Rudy Giuliani Says There Is ‘Nothing Wrong’ With Trump Campaign Working With Russia
Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani says that there is nothing wrong with working with Russia in order to obtain information about their opponents, according to The Hill. While speaking with Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union, the lawyer hedged on the issue, saying that it might not be morally right, but it certainly isn’t illegal and depends on the kind of material on is receiving.
“There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians,” Giuliani said. “It depends on where it came from. You’re assuming that the giving of information is a campaign contribution.”
Tapper questioned Giuliani’s statement and asked him if he would accept information from a foreign adversary if he were in Trump’s position.
“I probably wouldn’t, I wasn’t asked,” Giuliani said. “I would have advised, just out of an excess of caution, ‘don’t do it.'”
Tapper continued to push back against Giuliani, attempting to clarify whether or not the lawyer believed that there was nothing wrong with taking information from Russian intelligence. Giuliani responded that the important thing is whether or not the issue is a crime, not whether it is immoral.
“There’s no crime,” Giuliani insisted. “We’re going to get into morality? That isn’t what prosecutors look at — morality.”
“There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians,” Rudy Giuliani tells @jaketapper. #CNNSOTU https://t.co/2ikCEYXdVk pic.twitter.com/rCJ9shAdrM
— CNN (@CNN) April 21, 2019
This isn’t the first time that Giuliani has claimed that it’s acceptable to work with foreign intelligence to obtain information in a presidential campaign. While speaking with NBC’s Chuck Todd, Giuliani said that it all comes down to the kind of information you are getting.
“So, it is now okay for political campaigns to work with materials stolen by foreign adversaries?” Todd asked the lawyer.
“Well, it depends on the stolen material,” Giuliani replied.
Giuliani also spoke with Fox News on Sunday, where he defended Trump’s desire to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
“When did Mueller become God?” he asserted.
He also said that there were no plans at this point to issue a counter-report to the Mueller findings at this point because the White House wanted to let the public debate play out.
Trump has claimed victory after the Mueller report’s release because it did not claim definitively that there was any obstruction of justice on the part of the Trump administration. It did, however, exonerate the president on the question of Russian collusion as far as Mueller is able to determine.
As a result, Giuliani has been on a press tour defending the actions of the Trump campaign as people continue to sift through the report and question some of the decisions that the campaign made, such as attempting to obtain information from Russian informants.
