President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani said Sunday that there was “nothing wrong” with a campaign accepting help from Russia.
“There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians,” Giuliani told CNN host Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
“It depends on where it came from,” he added. “You’re assuming that the giving of information is a campaign contribution.”{mosads}
Tapper pushed back on Giuliani’s claim, questioning whether Giuliani would accept information from Russians against a candidate if he were running for office.
“I probably wouldn’t. I wasn’t asked,” Giuliani responded. “I would have advised, just out of excess of caution, don’t do it.”
“But you’re saying there was nothing wrong with doing that,” Tapper interjected.
“There’s no crime,” Giuliani replied. “We’re going to get into morality? That isn’t what prosecutors look at — morality.”
Giuliani appeared to make similar comments to NBC’s Chuck Todd in an interview that aired Sunday.
“So, it is now OK for political campaigns to work with materials stolen by foreign adversaries?” Todd asked the attorney on “Meet the Press.”
“Well, it depends on the stolen material,” Giuliani responded.
Giuliani’s comments came after the attorney in the same interview criticized GOP Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) for issuing a statement on Friday saying he was “appalled” by the findings laid out in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on his investigation into the Trump campaign and Russian election interference.
“I am also appalled that, among other things, fellow citizens working in a campaign for president welcomed help from Russia — including information that had been illegally obtained; that none of them acted to inform American law enforcement,” Romney wrote.
Giuliani told Hill.TV on Thursday that Mueller’s 400-plus-page report took a “cheap shot” at the president, calling Mueller’s findings “one-sided.”
Trump and his associates have levied an onslaught of attacks against Mueller’s report in recent days, declaring victory after the report found that there was no coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The special counsel, however, wrote in his report that his team probed 10 “episodes” of potential obstruction of justice, leaving the door open to possible congressional probes of Trump’s conduct.