Late last week, as we discussed here, the President’s former “fixer” Michael Cohen signaled through his attorney that he was willing to testify that Donald Trump knew in advance of his son’s meeting with a Russian delegation that had come to New York prior to the 2016 election promising illegally-gotten “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump, staying true to form, responded to the news by melting down on Twitter, calling the Mueller investigation a “rigged witch hunt,” and once again stating definitively, “There is no collusion!” Well, it looks as though sometime between that Sunday morning meltdown and this morning, when Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani hit the cable news circuit, a decision had been made to change tack yet once again, tentatively embracing the idea of collusion, but arguing that collusion isn’t a crime.
Colluding with Russia is “not a crime,” Giuliani told CNN… “I have been sitting here trying to find collusion as a crime,” Giuliani said on Fox and Friends, then going on to repeat, “Collusion is not a crime.”
Giuliani: "I don't even know if that's a crime, colluding about Russians. You start analyzing the crime — the hacking is the crime. The president didn't hack” pic.twitter.com/GTnUxXBeTL
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) July 30, 2018
So, it looks as though there’s a attempt to move the goalposts mid-game. No longer is Trump’s team insisting that there was “no collusion.” Now it would appear as though they’re floating a trial balloon, saying that, even if there was collusion, it’s not a crime. And, for what it’s worth, they no longer seem to be arguing that Trump didn’t know in advance about that suspicious June 9, 2016 meeting that took place at Trump Tower between senior members of the Trump campaign, including Donald Trump Jr., and a delegation of Russians with ties to the Kremlin. This morning, Giuliani would only say taht Trump didn’t attend the meeting himself. [Asked on CNN if he could say for certain that Trump didn’t know in advance about the meeting, Giuliani said that “nobody can be sure of anything.”] And, perhaps most laughably, Giuliani is now saying that the only real crime in all of this is hacking, and that the President, as he isn’t himself a hacker, is innocent.
All of this, of course, is bullshit. While it’s true that there’s no federal statute that states definitively that “collusion” is a crime, we have plenty of laws against conspiring with foreign governments to influence our elections, and that’s what we’re talking about here. Furthermore, as any prosecutor can tell you, it’s not just the hacker who has committed a crime in an instance like this, but also those who gave the orders… hence the recent grand jury indictments against the 12 Russian GRU agents who oversaw the hacking campaign.
We can’t allow this trial balloon to go up unchallenged. We cannot allow the Trump administration to move the goalposts now, after swearing for two full years that there was no collusion. We need to keep reminding ourselves (and everyone we know) that, for the past two years, the Trump administration kept demanding that there was “no collusion,” and that Trump didn’t know about the Trump Tower meeting between members of his campaign and Russian agents. We need to keep sharing videos like this one, showing the extent to which they denied that there was any coordination with the Russians in the run up to the election. We can’t allow history to be rewritten.
I can't stop watching this pic.twitter.com/oRNbixkhd1
— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) July 21, 2017
update: Trump has now weighed it to say that he didn’t collude, and, even if he did, it wouldn’t be a crime… Makes sense, right?
Collusion is not a crime, but that doesn’t matter because there was No Collusion (except by Crooked Hillary and the Democrats)!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2018