Giuliani doesn’t deny Trump campaign may have colluded with Russia

[GMDino]

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/giuliani-doesnt-deny-trump-campaign-may-have-colluded-with-russia-2019-01-16?mod=newsviewer_click

Quote:Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, said he doesn’t deny that the Trump campaign may have colluded with Russians in the 2016 election — only that Donald Trump himself did not.

Quote:‘I never said there was no collusion between the campaign, or people in the campaign.’Rudy Giuliani

Speaking on CNN on Wednesday night, Giuliani claimed he has only said Trump himself was not involved in collusion.


“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,” he said.
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Quote:
Cuomo Prime Time

@CuomoPrimeTime




"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://cnn.it/2FwzM5o 

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Giuliani also said Trump has never denied there was no collusion, just that he himself had not colluded. Trump has repeatedly and vociferously said there was “no collusion” and that the Mueller investigation into collusion was a “witch hunt.”


“[Trump] didn’t say ‘nobody,’ he said he didn’t,” Giuliani said. “How would you know nobody in your campaign...” before he was cut off.

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.”


The Mueller probe has made a number of connections between members of Trump’s campaign and Russians.


Later in Wednesday’s interview, Giuliani appeared to backtrack, saying that 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 a CNN interview in July, Giuliani questioned even whether collusion is criminal. “I don’t even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians,” he said.

[Au165]

Slowly walking back things like this isn't a good look. If I was Trump I'd probably fire Giuliani, you always die with the lie.

[jj22]

The writing has been on the wall. Trump is a disgrace and has committed the biggest act of treason against this nation since Benedict Arnold. He's sold out who knows how many secrets of ours and our Allies to Putin in undercover secret meetings this after helping him attack America and it's democracy.

It's just a matter of when his defenders/supporters will step up and be proAmerica like they claimed to be, or will they continue to show their true colors (that they only were proAmerica when it came to athletes kneeling during the Anthem).

We are living in historic times.

[GMDino]

(01-17-2019, 11:55 AM)jj22 Wrote: The writing has been on the wall. Trump is a disgrace and has committed the biggest act of treason against this nation since Benedict Arnold. He's sold out who knows how many secrets of ours and our Allies to Putin in undercover secret meetings this after helping him attack America and it's democracy.

It's just a matter of when his defenders/supporters will step up and be proAmerica like they claimed to be, or will they continue to show their true colors (that they only were proAmerica when it came to athletes kneeling during the Anthem).

We are living in historic times.

I don't know what he is guilty or not guilty f or if anything will ever come to pass against Trump personally...I do know that there will people who still supported Nixon even as he was resigning and that 40+ years later Nixon has only grown in respect with some sections of the US.

But none of this looks good.

Many of us wanted Bill Clinton ro resign over lying under oath about an affair.  I don't hear that kind of talk coming for the right with all of this about DJT.

[Dill]

Stephen Colbert last night, on a riff about Giuliani walking back collusion:

"According to Giuliani, 'even breaking the law is not a crime.'"

[fredtoast]

I doubt they will ever pin anything on the Donald.

Just like Reagan knew nothing about the Iran Contra affair.

[*michaelsean*]

(01-17-2019, 11:55 AM)jj22 Wrote: The writing has been on the wall. Trump is a disgrace and has committed the biggest act of treason against this nation since Benedict Arnold. He's sold out who knows how many secrets of ours and our Allies to Putin in undercover secret meetings this after helping him attack America and it's democracy.

It's just a matter of when his defenders/supporters will step up and be proAmerica like they claimed to be, or will they continue to show their true colors (that they only were proAmerica when it came to athletes kneeling during the Anthem).

We are living in historic times.

Not treason. (sorry pet peeve)

[GMDino]

Hold the presses!

We have a reaction retraction!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/us/politics/giuliani-collusion.html

Quote:President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani backtracked on Thursday from a surprising assertion he had made a night earlier that left open the possibility that Trump campaign aides might have coordinated with Russia in its election interference in 2016.

“There was no collusion by President Trump in any way, shape or form,” Mr. Giuliani said in a statement on Thursday, reiterating the president’s longstanding defense against accusations that his campaign secretly coordinated with Moscow to help swing the election. “Likewise, I have no knowledge of any collusion by any of the thousands of people who worked on the campaign.”


He added, referring to discredited conspiracy theories that the president and his allies have long cited, “The only knowledge I have in this regard is the collusion of the Clinton campaign with Russia, which has so far been ignored.”


Mr. Giuliani was seeking to clarify an interview on Wednesday night in which he stopped short of defending Trump campaign aides, drawing speculation that he might have inside knowledge of possible coordination with Russia.



“I never said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in the campaign,” he told CNN. He added: “I said the president of the United States. There is not a single bit of evidence the president of the United States committed the only crime you could commit here, conspired with the Russians to hack” the Democratic National Committee.



[ Trump allies have repeatedly shifted their defense as evidence of contacts with Russians grew.]


Mr. Giuliani’s backpedaling was the latest in a series of conflicting comments he has made about the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. The evolution of his statements have suggested shifts in the president’s defense strategy, often following developments in the investigations. On Tuesday, prosecutors for the special counsel filed a 200-page, mostly redacted court document related to the case against Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. 
Among the little information that was not blacked out were details about his relationship with a Russian whom prosecutors have said has ties to Russian intelligence.

The special counsel’s document was in response to a recent filing by Mr. Manafort’s legal team, which inadvertently disclosed that Mr. Manafort had provided his Russian associate with American polling data — details that offer the clearest example yet that the Trump campaign may have tried to coordinate with Russia before the 2016 election.


Mr. Giuliani has previously denied that there was coordination by Trump campaign aides.


“When I say the Trump campaign, I mean the upper levels of the Trump campaign,” Mr. Giuliani said during a July interview with Fox News. “I have no reason to believe anybody else did. The only ones I checked with obviously are the top four or five people.”


Mr. Giuliani also went a bit further on the collusion defense, telling Fox, “Even if he did it, it’s not a crime.”

[/url]
Everyone Who’s Been Charged in Investigations Related to the 2016 Election
Thirty-seven people have been charged in investigations related to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.


The president agreed with him in a subsequent [url=https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1024263146008207361?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1024263146008207361&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2018%2F07%2F30%2Fus%2Fpolitics%2Frudy-giuliani-collusion-trump.html&module=inline]Twitter post, and added that Hillary Clinton, his former Democratic rival, was the one who was doing the colluding.

Mr. Trump has long maintained that his campaign never aided Russia’s meddling, even as the special counsel inquiry has revealed communications between Russians and some Trump campaign aides.


While the word “collusion” has no defined legal meaning, in plain English, it means working together, typically in secret, to do something illicit. And whether Mr. Trump knew during the campaign of any Russian attempts to disrupt the election has been a central question in the investigation that started in the summer of 2016.


Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, was prepared to tell prosecutors that Mr. Trump knew about a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower that was arranged so campaign officials could get damaging information on Mrs. Clinton from Russians.


The president and his lawyers have denied that Mr. Trump had any knowledge of the meeting until July 2017, when The New York Times was preparing to publish an article about it.


At the time, when the White House was scrambling to prepare a statement about the Trump Tower meeting in response to The Times’s article, Mr. Trump met with President Vladimir V. Putin for more than two hours in Hamburg, Germany, where they were attending an economic summit meeting. Later that day, Mr. Trump sought out the Russian leader during a summit meeting dinner. Only interpreters, the secretary of state at the time, Rex W. Tillerson, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, were in the first meeting with Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin. Afterward, Mr. Trump took his interpreter’s notes and told the interpreter not to tell anyone what was discussed. No American officials were present for the second encounter during the dinner.


The following day, while Mr. Trump traveled back to Washington on Air Force One, he called a Times reporter to say that the Russians had been falsely accused by American intelligence agencies of hacking during the campaign. The president also huddled with his aides to draft a statement in response to the article about the Trump Tower meeting and personally dictated a misleading account that the meeting was about Russian adoptions. He did not admit that the meeting was arranged to address Russia’s offer to help his campaign, which emails later obtained by The Times confirmed.


Earlier this week, senators questioned Mr. Trump’s nominee to be the next attorney general, William P. Barr, about how the Justice Department would handle a hypothetical report from Mr. Mueller. That there will be such a report at the end of the special counsel’s investigation is just speculation, but Mr. Barr was pressed on whether he would share the report with Congress and the public and whether what he shared would be an altered version of the original.



The questioning drew on comments Mr. Giuliani had previously made about how the president might invoke executive privilege to prevent the report from going to Congress, or that the White House might edit the report before sending it to lawmakers “so we can correct it if they’re wrong.”


Mr. Barr assured senators on Tuesday that the White House would not be correcting the report before releasing it. And Mr. Giuliani said his comments Wednesday on CNN had not been an effort to address a possible Mueller report detailing evidence of cooperation between Trump campaign aides and Russia.


“I have no knowledge of collusion involving the campaign, nor does the president,” Mr. Giuliani told The Times on Thursday. “However, I only represent the president, and that’s all I can speak for.”