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Defense of Trump Shifts as Evidence of Contacts With Russians Mounts

WASHINGTON — In the days after the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump’s advisers had an unequivocal message about contacts between Russians and members of the campaign team: There were none.

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By
Mark Mazzetti
, New York Times

WASHINGTON — In the days after the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump’s advisers had an unequivocal message about contacts between Russians and members of the campaign team: There were none.

In the ensuing months, as numerous such communications were revealed, the message changed: There was no collusion with Russia’s effort to disrupt the election.

On Monday, President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani consistently presented a third line of defense: Even if Trump did collude with the Russians, he committed no crime.

Giuliani insisted during numerous television interviews that no evidence of collusion existed, but the evolving narrative is a sign of how much Trump and his aides have had to recalibrate their public message in the face of considerable evidence of contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign, and with the special counsel investigating what — if anything — Trump knew about them.

It is unclear whether Giuliani’s television musings amount to the beginnings of a new strategy, and it is not the first time Trump’s allies have pointed out that there is no specific crime of “collusion.” But Giuliani repeated the defense throughout the day.

“My client didn’t do it. And even if he did it, it’s not a crime,” he said on Fox News.

“Hacking is the crime. The president didn’t hack. He didn’t pay for the hacking,” he said on CNN.

His remarks follow similar comments from several of Trump’s allies during interviews over the weekend.

“Collusion is not a crime,” Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Legal experts agree that is at least technically correct, as the federal criminal code does not detail a crime of “collusion.” Any possible crime, they said, would be a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russians to break laws regulating elections.

But some experts said the difference between “collusion” and “conspiracy” is semantic.

“It’s just a word choice,” said Julie O’Sullivan, a criminal law professor at Georgetown University. “I’m sure nobody in the Justice Department has ever investigated collusion, but they’ve certainly investigated conspiracy.

“And Rudy,” she said of Trump’s lawyer, a former associate attorney general and U.S. attorney in Manhattan, “knows better.”

The question of what Trump knows of the Russian campaign to disrupt the 2016 election has come up most recently after reports that Michael Cohen, his former lawyer, was willing to tell special counsel Robert Mueller that Trump knew in advance of a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower that was set up for campaign officials to get dirt about Hillary Clinton from Russians. It is not clear whether Cohen has firsthand knowledge of what or when Trump was told about the meeting.

Trump and his lawyers have said repeatedly that he knew nothing about the meeting until last July, when The New York Times was preparing an article revealing its existence.

One of Trump’s most ardent supporters in Congress said over the weekend that, even if Trump did know about that meeting and has been lying about it all along, it hardly matters.

“If he’s proven to have not told the whole truth about the fact that campaigns look for dirt, and if someone offers it, you listen to them, nobody’s going to be surprised,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif. “There are some things in politics that you just take for granted.”

The president’s supporters are mounting a defense on significantly different turf than they did in the days immediately after the November 2016 election. Shortly after Trump’s surprising victory, Sergei Ryabkov, the deputy Russian foreign minister, said the Russian government had contacts with the president-elect’s “immediate entourage” during the campaign. Hope Hicks, a campaign spokeswoman, offered a swift denial that the campaign had any contacts with Russians.

That proved to be untrue, and in the months that followed, the news media and the special counsel’s investigators revealed numerous instances of contacts between Russians and campaign aides.

The 2016 Trump Tower meeting is the most significant of the contacts revealed to date, as it showed that the upper echelon of the Trump campaign was eager to meet with Kremlin-connected Russians based on a promise of damaging information about Clinton.

Donald Trump Jr., who arranged the meeting on behalf of the campaign, has insisted for a year that he never informed his father about the meeting. Congressional investigators and Mueller’s team have scoured documents and interviewed witnesses in an effort to validate the claims of the president’s son.

During numerous interviews after the Trump Tower meeting was revealed, Trump Jr. seemed to lament that the meeting turned out to be a bust. The Trump campaign was eager for the Russian help, he indicated, but the Russians did not deliver the promised dirt.

“It was literally just a wasted 20 minutes, which was a shame,” he told Sean Hannity on Fox News.

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