Giuliani says Trump didn't collude with Russia — but he's not so sure about the campaign

Donald Trump’s repeated claim that there was “no collusion” between his presidential campaign and Russia has apparently not convinced his own lawyer.

In an CNN interview Wednesday, Rudy Giuliani refused to rule out that members of the 2016 campaign colluded with Moscow, but said Trump himself had nothing to do with it.

When asked about reports that Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort had given campaign data to a Kremlin-linked oligarch, Giuliani told a stunned Chris Cuomo, “I never said there was no collusion between the campaign, or between people in the campaign.”

“I said the president of the United States. There is not a single bit of evidence the president of the United States committed the only crime you can commit here — conspired with the Russians to hack the DNC,” he added

Giuliani also claimed that “if the collusion happened, it happened a long time ago.”

The pair then clashed over how Trump had framed his denials over the collusion question, with Giuliani insisting that the president had only claimed that he personally had had no ties to Russia.

Trump has tweeted more than a dozen times, including as recently as last month, that the campaign had not colluded with Russia.

“The Trump campaign did nothing wrong — no collusion!” he tweeted in February last year.

It’s not the first time Giuliani’s messaging has strayed from his client’s stock denial of any collusion. In a Fox interview in July last year, Giuliani took the line that “collusion is not a crime.”

Cover image: Rudy Giuliani, former New York City mayor and current lawyer for U.S. President Donald Trump, speaks to members of the media during a White House Sports and Fitness Day at the South Lawn of the White House May 30, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)