President Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, continued to insist that collusion is “not a crime” this week before demanding Special Counsel Robert Mueller end the Russia investigation.
It’s the same lines Trump and Giuliani have been using for months and months to attack the probe that has thus far produced multiple indictments, plea deals, and prison sentences as the investigation continues to unravel exactly what happened in the 2016 Election.
And Giuliani continued repeating the lines during a radio show when he once again claimed that there was “no collusion” and even if Trump did collude with Russia, collusion is “not a crime.”
“It should have been wrapped up probably in May or June,” Giuliani complained about the probe. “That’s when they figured out they had no evidence of collusion. Collusion is not a crime, by the way.”
“You have to show a conspiracy to hack [the Democratic National Committee],” he continued “They don’t have any evidence of that, which is the reason they don’t submit a report — because they are embarrassed.”
Guiliani concluded by demanding Mueller close the investigation:
“I’m challenging them: It’s time to put up or shut up. It’s time for them to submit a report. They don’t have, as we would say in New York, a damn thing.”
Here’s the audio:
First of, Giuliani does not actually know what Mueller and his team have found. He is not privy to the evidence that has been collected and it’s very possible that Mueller has filed a sealed indictment charging Trump under the statute of Conspiracy to Defraud the United States, also known as 18 U.S.C. 371.
While there is no specific law pertaining to the word “collusion,” a term Giuliani and Trump prefer to use, it’s merely another word for conspiracy. In other words, Giuliani and Trump are hoping semantics is a good legal defense. Except it’s not.
Because U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, who is a Trump appointee, recently ruled that collusion is a crime.
Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor and lecturer at George Washington Law School, wrote about the ruling on his blog.
“This court ruling should drive another nail in the coffin of the argument that collusion is not a crime. It clearly can be, and the crime is conspiracy – even if no other independent criminal violations are identified,” he wrote.
And Trump has already provided evidence of collusion himself on Twitter by admitting that his son set up a meeting with Russian agents at Trump Tower to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government to use it against her 2016 campaign.
Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2018
Trump is also on video asking the Russians to find Hillary Clinton’s emails, which they tried to do immediately upon request by hacking her campaign and the DNC.
But the fact is that the Trump Tower meeting may have violated several laws, including conspiracy to commit a crime, covering up the conspiracy, lying to cover up the crime, and coordinating with co-conspirators.
And even Mueller can read Trump’s tweets, which have already been used against him in court by his own Justice Department.
All Giuliani is doing is making his own client look guilty and himself look foolish.
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