President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani on Sunday defended the Trump campaign’s attempts to accept foreign help during the 2016 election.
“Any candidate in the whole world in America would take information,” Giuliani told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview.
“Who says it’s even illegal?” he asked, adding later: “There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians.”
While accepting foreign campaign help is illegal, Mueller said in his redacted final report released Thursday that he did not charge Donald Trump Jr. or others on the Trump campaign for seeking Russian help — in the form of a meeting they took during the campaign at Trump Tower with several Russians they believed had dirt on Hillary Clinton — because there wasn’t sufficient evidence to establish the Trump officials knew they were breaking the law.
Mueller said of meeting organizer Don Jr., for example, that he “could mount a factual defense that he did not believe his response to the offer and the June 9 meeting itself violated the law.”
Mueller also cited the “difficulty in establishing the required valuation” of the dirt meeting — that is, the challenge of convincing a court that what the Russians offered was valuable enough to have been illegal.
