Following the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election last week, President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani said that there’s “nothing wrong with taking information from Russians.”
Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Giuliani called out Republican senator and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney for his reaction to Mueller’s report.
Reacting to Romney’s statement that he was “appalled” that workers on a U.S. presidential campaign would welcome help from Russia, Giuliani responded, “I could tell you the things that he wanted to do.”
Giuliani continued, “Stop the bull. Stop this pious act that you weren’t trying to dig up dirt on people, putting dirt out on people” when Romney was running for president.
“What a hypocrite. Any candidate in the whole world, in America, would take information,” Giuliani told CNN host Jake Tapper.
When Tapper asked if that included information from a foreign source, Giuliani responded, “Who says it’s even illegal? And does the information turn out to be false, by the way?”
Giuliani continued, “There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians. It depends on where it came from. You’re assuming that the giving of information is a campaign contribution. Read the report carefully. The report says we can’t conclude that, because the law is pretty much against that. People get information from this person, that person…”
Giuliani did allow, however, that he himself “probably wouldn’t” take information from Russians that was damaging to a candidate.
“I probably wouldn’t. I wasn’t asked. I would have advised, just out of excess of caution, ‘Don’t do it,’” Giuliani told Tapper.
Giuliani eventually circled back to Romney, who ran for president in the 2008 and 2012 elections, saying he’d “like to take a good look” at Romney’s campaign for any wrongdoing among his staffers.
“I’d like to take a good look at Romney’s campaign, and see if there were any immoral or unethical things done by the people working for him that he didn’t know about,” Giuliani said. “If there weren’t, then it was the only campaign in history … there’s no campaign in history that hasn’t done that.”
See Tapper’s interview with Giuliani below.
“There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians,” Rudy Giuliani tells @jaketapper. #CNNSOTU https://t.co/2ikCEYXdVk pic.twitter.com/rCJ9shAdrM
— CNN (@CNN) April 21, 2019