Giuliani says there was no collusion because the Trump campaign 'rejected' Russian political 'dirt'
Rudy Giuliani defended President Trump on Fox News on Wednesday night by saying that what matters isn't whether Trump's campaign got compromising information on Hillary Clinton from Russians, but rather that Trump never used it.
"They rejected it," he told host Laura Ingraham. "If there was collusion with the Russians, they would have used it." Now a member of Trump's legal team, Giuliani said that when he was running for office in New York City and for president, Democrats "were looking for dirt on me every day. That's what you do, maybe you shouldn't, but you do. Nothing illegal about that." When it comes to the sources of that dirt, he added, no one is off limits. "Even if it comes from a Russian, a German, an American, doesn't matter," he said.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is about to start his second year investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russians, and the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday released transcripts from an interview it conducted with Donald Trump Jr. regarding a meeting he had in Trump Tower ahead of the election with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer. Trump Jr. set up that meeting after learning that the lawyer was offering the Trump team compromising information about Clinton.
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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