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According to Rudy Giuliani, ‘There’s Nothing Wrong With Taking Information From Russians’

Photo credit: CNN
Photo credit: CNN

From Esquire

Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, appeared on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, and in his interview with Jake Tapper declared that there was “nothing wrong” with Americans accepting intelligence from Russian operatives.

Tapper asked Giuliani to respond to Senator Mitt Romney’s condemnation of the Trump campaign for cooperating with Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election rather than informing US law enforcement. "Any candidate in the whole world, in America, would take information," said Giuliani. "There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians. It depends on where it came from."

"You would have accepted information from Russians against a candidate if you were running in the presidential election?" Tapper asked.

"I probably wouldn’t," Giuliani admitted. "I wasn’t asked, I would have advised just out of excess of caution, don’t do it."

It is illegal, per federal criminal code, for foreign nationals to donate "money or other [things] of value" to US elections. And Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr.’s infamous Trump Tower meeting, which found the first son agreeing to meet with a Russian attorney who offered dirt on Hillary Clinton, definitely looked like a potential violation of that law. But Special Counsel Robert Mueller declined to charge Kushner and Don Jr., noting that as the Russians apparently didn’t actually deliver much in the way of incriminating information it would be hard to measure “value,” and that it would have also been tough to prove that the men knew that what they were doing was potentially illegal.

Former US attorney Preet Bharara appeared on State of the Union after Giuliani. "I appreciate that Rudy Giuliani’s role in this is to defend the president, I guess at all costs,” he said. “But he should pause and think about what he’s saying...that we should be telling future candidates in the run up to an election in 2020, that if a foreign adversary is offering information against a political opponent, that it's okay and right and proper and American to take that information. That is an extraordinary statement, and I would hope that he would retract it.”

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