Rudy Giuliani Pushes the Limits of "Collusion Is Not a Crime"

By Abigail Tracy, Vanity Fair

31 July 18

Trump didn’t personally hack Hillary Clinton’s e-mail, so what’s the big deal?

nce again, Rudy Giuliani appears to be getting ahead of his client. Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that neither he nor anyone on his campaign colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election—a claim he repeated just this weekend, when he tweeted that the only “real” collusion was “on the Democrats side” [sic]. The president’s lead attorney, however, is already working off next month’s script. “I have been sitting here looking in the federal code trying to find collusion as a crime,” Giuliani said Monday morning on Trump’s favorite cable-news program, Fox & Friends. Later, on CNN’s New Day, he went further. “I don’t even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians,” he said. “You start analyzing the crime—the hacking is the crime. The president didn’t hack. He didn’t pay them for hacking.”

The Trump legal team has been laying the groundwork for this defense for some time. “For something to be a crime, there has to be a statute that you claim is being violated,” former White House lawyer Jay Sekulow told Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker last year. “There is not a statute that refers to criminal collusion. There is no crime of collusion.” Sure, members of the Trump campaign may have entertained an offer for help from Russia in June 2016; and yes, Donald Trump subsequently called on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail; but neither necessarily represents a quid pro quo or an illegal campaign contribution. Or so the Trump legal team seems to be preparing to argue.

It is true that there is a lack of clarity surrounding the definition of “collusion” within the legal community. But Trump would have to move the goal posts onto an entirely different field to make that case. What’s more, “collusion is not a crime” is hardly a bulletproof defense. As former White House general counsel Robert Bauer told me last week, “collusion” is really shorthand for variety of activities, some legal and some illegal. “It definitely covers technical offenses,” he explained. “It includes U.S. citizen aid and support to a foreign national trying to influence a federal election, which is illegal.” To wit, Trump wouldn’t have had to personally hack into the Democratic National Committee server or conduct the phishing attack on John Podesta to be guilty of a crime.

Why Trump continues to allow Giuliani to do on-camera interviews, or to keep him as an attorney at all, is something of a mystery. Nevertheless, his sudden reappearance on the media circuit—in nervy, pugnacious form—suggests the president, too, is on edge. In the past weeks, Trump’s former attorney, fixer, and confidant Michael Cohen has turned openly against him, teasing his knowledge of Trump’s involvement with the June 9, 2016, meeting between members of his campaign and Russians peddling dirt on Clinton. According to CNN, Cohen has alleged that Trump had advanced knowledge of that meeting—something the president has long denied. Speaking with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on Monday, Giuliani offered his own convoluted denial of Trump’s foreknowledge, but also revealed the existence of an earlier planning meeting on June 7 at which Cohen, Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and Rick Gates were present. Giuliani appears to say this is the meeting Cohen would have been alluding to, after which Trump approved of plans to meet with the Russians. At the same time, Giuliani insists that no such conversation ever took place, and that Trump didn’t know about it. (In a follow-up interview with Fox News, Giuliani subsequently attempted to clarify that the June 7 meeting—or perhaps it was on June 6, he said—in fact never happened, and was a “figment of [Cohen’s] imagination.” Why he saw fit to describe the meeting in the first place, if it didn’t exist, is also unclear.)

Whatever transpired, Mueller appears to be closing in on the truth. Also last week, it was reported that Mueller has subpoenaed Allen Weisselberg, the longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, to testify before a grand jury. Weisselberg’s ties to the Trump family go back decades. As Trump biographer Tim O’Brien wrote, if Weisselberg “winds up in investigators’ cross hairs for secreting payoffs, he could potentially provide much more damaging information to prosecutors than Cohen ever could about the president’s dealmaking.” Not only did Weisselberg oversee the trust Trump set up to manage his business interests while he is in the Oval Office, he also held a prominent position inside the president’s troubled eponymous charity organizations, and was entrusted preparing Trump’s tax returns. In the week ahead, Mueller is set to begin the trial of Paul Manafort, who also attended the Trump Tower meeting (or meetings) involving the Russians. If he bails out of his defense and cuts a deal with Mueller at any point, he would surely have a tale to tell.

Trump and his lawyers are feeling the pressure. Over the weekend, Giuliani gave an interview to Axios in which he downplayed the significance of the Weisselberg subpoena and the president’s rift with Cohen, but conceded that Trump’s patience with Mueller is wearing thin. “Enough is enough,” he said, characterizing the president’s view of the matter. “He’s thinking: ‘Hey, the guy should get this over now.’”

And yet, there appears to be no end in sight for Trump. Mueller and Giuliani have yet to reach an agreement over whether the president will sit for an interview with the special counsel—an impasse that, arguably, prevents Mueller from concluding the obstruction of justice portion of his investigation. Giuliani recently said that Trump would agree to an interview only if it’s limited to questions about collusion—likely a nonstarter for Mueller.

Meanwhile, there are more tapes. During an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Giuliani disclosed that federal prosecutors from Manhattan’s Southern District seized 183 audio recordings during the F.B.I. raid on Cohen’s properties earlier this year. Whether these are exculpatory, as Giuliani suggested, remains to be seen. According to the president’s lawyer, there are about a dozen tapes in which Cohen discusses Trump. When I spoke to Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, last week, he suggested that he has the power to release Cohen’s recordings if he feels that Giuliani is lying about his client. “This is the beginning of my ability to rebut lies that are smearing my client,” he told me. “That’s it.”