President Trump argued Tuesday that collusion cannot be a criminal offense, but he nevertheless doubled down on his denial of any wrongdoing.
“Collusion is not a crime, but that doesn’t matter because there was No Collusion (except by Crooked Hillary and the Democrats)!” he tweeted.
The president’s current lead attorney, former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, made this same argument Monday during a CNN interview.
“I don’t even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians,” Mr. Giuliani said. “You start analyzing the crime — the hacking is the crime. The president didn’t hack. He didn’t pay them for hacking.”
Mr. Giuliani’s interview was the first time the White House, which has always denied outright any collusion with foreign actors, has made this argument, although lawyers often “argue in the alternative.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into claims of collusion between the president and Russian hackers took a dramatic turn last week when Mr. Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen flipped on the president.
Anonymous sources told CNN that Mr. Cohen is willing to testify that the president knew about and approved the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting that his son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort held with Russians pitching campaign dirt on political rival Hillary Clinton.
Although the CNN report said Mr. Cohen had no recordings or other hard evidence to back up his claim, if it were substantiated, it would be at a minimum a major political blow to the president.
Mr. Giuliani was dismissing these accusations when he argued that collusion can’t be criminal.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly denounced the special counsel’s investigation as biased and a “witch hunt,” and he has insisted there was no collusion.
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