President Trump's defense in the Russia investigation has been
a study in goal-post moving — constantly watering down previous denials and raising the standard for what would constitute actual wrongdoing.
But rarely has it been so concentrated in one morning.
Trump's lawyer/spokesman Rudolph W. Giuliani appeared on Fox News's and CNN's morning shows on Monday to downplay the idea that colluding with the Russians would have even been illegal and to argue against strawmen.
The most notable portion of the interviews was when Giuliani rekindled the idea that collusion isn't even a crime. Trump's defenders have occasionally noted that the word doesn't appear in the criminal code — which is
a misnomer — but Giuliani took it a step further: He basically suggested Trump would have had to pay for Russia to interfere on his behalf.
“I don't even know if that's a crime — colluding with Russians,” Giuliani said on CNN. “Hacking is the crime. The president didn't hack. He didn't pay for the hacking.”
...
Giuliani also, at one point, seemed to offer a very narrow denial of what happened with the Trump Tower meeting. While discussing
Michael Cohen's allegation that Trump knew about the meeting, Giuliani focused his defense on arguing not necessarily that Trump didn't know about it — but that he
wasn't physically at the meeting. And he did it on both shows.