President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Wednesday night that he doesn’t deny the Trump campaign may have colluded with Russians in the 2016 US election – only that President Trump himself did not.
“There is not a single bit of evidence the President of the United States committed the only crime you can commit here, conspiring with the Russians to hack the DNC,” said Giuliani.
“I never said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in the campaign… I have not. I said the President of the United States,” Pres. Trump’s attorney @RudyGiuliani tells @ChrisCuomo https://t.co/Jy0gttT6Ac pic.twitter.com/JGISmtgrdy
— Cuomo Prime Time (@CuomoPrimeTime) January 17, 2019
Giuliani also claimed that Trump has never denied that there was no collusion by his campaign – just that he didn’t personally collude.
“[Trump] didn’t say ‘nobody,’ he said he didn’t,” said Giuliani. “How would you know nobody in your campaign…” before Cuomo interjected.
Giuliani has, in fact, denied there was any collusion by the Trump campaign on numerous occasions, including telling Fox News’ Laura Ingraham last May that the Trump campaign didn’t use information obtained from Russia thus proving there was no collusion. “If there was collusion with the Russians, they would have used it,” he said at the time. That same month, he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that “Russian collusion is total fake news.” –MarketWatch
Giuliani then attempted to walk back his statements later in Wednesday’s interview, saying if “the collusion happened, it happened a long time ago. . . . It’s not provable because it never happened. … I’m telling you there’s no chance it happened.”
In July, the Trump attorney questioned in a CNN interview whether collusion is criminal at all. “I don’t even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians,” he said.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller accused former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort of lying about sharing polling data with an alleged Rusian spy while the 2016 election was in full swing.
Asked by Cuomo whether that was considered collusion, Giuliani said that “polling data is given to everybody,” while trying to downplay the situation – adding that Trump didn’t know about it until it was covered in the news.
via RSS http://bit.ly/2VZBmSp Tyler Durden