While President Donald Trump continues to face public pressure over the ongoing partial federal government shutdown, he and his team still have to deal with the ongoing fallout from the Russia scandal. Yet again this week, his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani flailed on national television in an attempt to defend the Trump team, claiming he and the president never said there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia — which anyone who’s followed the Russia investigation for any amount of time will easily be able to identify as a wild statement.
He told host Chris Cuomo:
‘I never said there was no collusion between the campaign, or people in the campaign — I said the president of the United States. There is not a single bit of evidence that the president of the United States committed the only crime you can commit here and conspired with the Russians to hack the DNC.’
He added of the president’s own past statements on the matter:
‘He didn’t say nobody — he didn’t. He said he didn’t. He didn’t say nobody. How would you know that nobody in your campaign colluded?’
Watch below.
Giuliani has formerly said there was no collusion between the campaign and Russia, although he qualified his statement by saying he meant just the upper levels of the campaign. Meanwhile, to say Trump has indicated there was no collusion — at all — would be an understatement. Just check his Twitter feed.
Cuomo confronted the former mayor right then and there with the error of his ways, pointing out among other issues that whether or not a president committed a crime shouldn’t be the only standard we’re working with. Just because he might have a get out of jail free card doesn’t mean he’s in the right.
Additionally, as Cuomo went on to point out, the question of collusion even involving the president himself doesn’t end with the hack of the physical computer servers belonging to the Democratic National Committee. Even if we’re going to go with only hacks as truly criminal in this whole enterprise, Kremlin agents also targeted Hillary Clinton’s own private email server at about the very same time that then-candidate Trump stood before the world and asked them to. Some may have taken the remark as him toeing a line for shock value — but the Russians were at the very least listening.
Giuliani struggled to come up with an orderly defense against these issues during his time on CNN this week, instead simply preferring to fall back on lines like that the FBI is “so damn biased” against the president to begin with. In reality, Cuomo pointed out, issues like former officials’ Peter Strzok and Lisa Page’s disdain for President Trump have already been examined repeatedly via inspector general reports and there’s yet to be any concrete evidence that the Russia investigation is biased.
Just recently, it came out that besides the already well known inquiry into whether or not the Trump team colluded with Russia, the FBI has looked into whether or not Trump has been a Russian agent while in office — so the evidence just keeps piling up.
Featured Image via Screenshot from the video
