US President Donald Trump’s top lawyer on Sunday attacked “calumny, lies and distortions” in the Mueller investigation report, and said there is “nothing wrong” with taking hacked information from Russia.
Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani mounted a combative defense of the president in Sunday talk show appearances that took aim at Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators, the evidence they amassed and the witnesses they cited.
He heaped special scorn on US Senator Mitt Romney, a former Republican presidential candidate who on Friday said that he was “sickened” by the report’s findings and “appalled” that Trump’s election campaign “welcomed help from Russia.”
“What a hypocrite. What a hypocrite. Any candidate in the whole world in America would take information,” Giuliani said of Romney on CNN’s State of the Union.
He was referring to Democratic e-mails that were hacked by Russian operatives and disseminated by WikiLeaks in 2016 to hurt his Democratic rival, former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“Who says it’s even illegal?” Giuliani added. “Does the information turn out to be false, by the way? The information that was gleaned and disseminated, every newspaper printed it.”
Trump publicly encouraged Russia and WikiLeaks while top campaign officials, including his son and son-in-law, met in Trump Tower with a Russian promising dirt on Clinton.
“There is nothing wrong with taking information from the Russians. It depends on where it came from,” Giuliani said, adding that as a lawyer he would have advised against it.
“This didn’t become an international scandal because of immorality. It became an international scandal because the president was accused of violating the law falsely,” he said.
His comments echoed Trump, who on Sunday mocked Romney on Twitter, after lashing out on Friday at the “bullshit” Mueller report.
Mueller’s 22-month-long investigation concluded that Trump and his team did not collude with the Russian effort to sway the elections in his favor, but it detailed 10 episodes of potential obstruction by Trump, including his firing of FBI director James Comey and demands that Mueller himself be removed.
However, Mueller declined to bring charges and US Attorney General Bill Barr said that cleared Trump.
Democrats, who have a majority in the US House of Representatives, now are considering whether to move to impeach the president, an effort likely to fail because Republicans control the Senate.
The White House’s strategy was on bristling display in Giuliani’s talk show appearances: attack the investigators as biased and the witness testimony as self-serving and untruthful.
Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Giuliani called the report “a prosecutor’s version of what happened.”
“It’s two or three pages of calumny, lies and distortion,” he said. “Half of it is not true.”
The White House has prepared a rebuttal of the Mueller report.
“We’re ready to put it out when we have to,” Giuliani said.
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