Monday, July 30, 2018

Giuliani Just Admitted Trump Colluded With the Russians

President Donald Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said Monday that he's not sure collusion with Russia would be considered a crime.
So now, after Trump has been bleating "no collusion, no collusion", Giuliani is saying "and if he did, so what?"

Which sounds a lot to me as though Trump did collude with the Russian government and Rudy knows that it's provable.

Funny how the Right has gone from calling the Russians "The Evil Empire" to climbing into bed with them.

10 comments:

  1. No. A lawyer taking a Rule 12(b)(6) approach to a legal question is not an admission on the merits. The substance of your post does not warrant the title.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jeez. Pick an argument and stick with it, especially in public. "In the alternative" doesn't really work on TV. Like "My client didn't do it no way and everyone who says so is a dirty liar, or, in the alternative, the law banning what my client did is unconstitutional." That works maybe in a courtroom. Not in the real world by anyone who wants to appear even slightly honest.

    Rudy seems to do that routinely, as though he picks today's argument on the spur of the moment or even with a dart board.

    ReplyDelete
  3. https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_12

    Why are you saying that the President wasn’t at the meeting?” Fox News commentator Melissa Francis asked. “Who asked if he was there? No one asked if he was there.”

    Giuliani was blunt: “Cohen is alleging that the meeting took place. We are making it clear that the President was not at that meeting. Cohen doesn’t even allege that. To cut it off.”

    Another meeting that has been leaked but hasn’t been published yet”

    Giuliani told Fox News that he and Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow had heard from reporters who’d been told about another meeting “in which they [Don Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and ‘possibly others’], out of the presence of the President, discussed the meeting with the Russians.”

    He categorically denied that the un-reported meeting he’d just brought up had ever happened.

    “We checked with their lawyers, the ones we could check with, for four of the six,” Giuliani said. “That meeting never ever took place, it didn’t happen. It’s a figment of his imagination, or he’s lying.”

    Giuliani mentioned a similar-sounding meeting on CNN earlier Monday, except he said it happened two days before the Russian dirt meeting, not three days before. Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, “and one more person” were in attendance, he said: “That’s a real meeting on another provable subject in which he was not participating.”

    Giuliani told Fox News that at least one of those senior advisers did meet three days before the dirt meeting, but on something unrelated to Russia. Instead, he said, “the only meeting they find for that day that included any of these people is a meeting about the Hispanic judge that the President had criticized back around that time.” That is, Judge Gonzalo Curiel.

    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/giuliani-walks-back-earlier-comments-denies-un-reported-meeting-on-dirt

    What do the rules of evidence say about this?

    ReplyDelete
  4. https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_801

    Are you claiming an inconsistency in those quotes? Allegation by Cohen, allegation by reporters, denial by Giuliani, mention of other fact. Bad public speaking, perhaps, but not logically inconsistent.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The meeting before the meeting explodes the story Don Jr. told that he never told his father about the latter meeting. Forget the rules of evidence, the logical consistency here is somewhere between missing and none. So far, Cohen has allegations, Giuliani has several stories that can’t create a consistent narrative.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Move over Occam, there's a new Razor in town...
    courtesy of Kevin Drum
    " Trump’s Razor: everything Trump says is a lie until proven otherwise"

    ReplyDelete
  7. Marshall’s Razor states that for any given action by Trump, the best explanation is the dumbest one.

    ReplyDelete
  8. DA, I thought that was Marshall’s Butter Knife?

    ReplyDelete
  9. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-continuing-triumph-trump

    I really have nothing to add. I wouldn’t have anticipated it. I couldn’t quite believe it when JG suggested it. And yet, Trump’s Razor is simply never wrong. So there it is.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Rule 12 doesn’t work well in the Court of Public Opinion, Brad. But I think you know that.

    ReplyDelete

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