In an extended discussion with host Laura Ingraham on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” on Tuesday night, attorney Rudy Giuliani said that President Donald Trump “puts it best when he says it [a collusion narrative] can’t happen again. And the only way you can assure this will not happen to another president is to find out what happened and who is responsible for it.”
Special counsel Robert Mueller several days ago wrapped up his nearly two-year investigation into alleged collusion between Trump and Russian interests and released his full report to Attorney General Bill Barr.
On Sunday, Barr issued a four-page summary to Congress showing there was no evidence Trump or his associates or campaign colluded with Russians to influence the 2016 presidential election. Mueller controversially punted on the issue of whether or not Trump obstructed justice. But Mueller did not recommend that Trump be charged for it, either.
After declaring the vindication of the president, Trump and members of his administration have said it’s now time to find out who was behind this investigation from the very beginning.
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“It has to be clear to any fair-minded person [that] the whole idea of conspiracy with the Russians, interference with the elections, collusion, if you want to call it that, is totally untrue,” said Giuliani. “Three investigations and not a single bit of evidence [from] every single witness who CNN said was a ‘blockbuster witness’ totally fell apart.”
Ingraham noted that Jeff Zucker, CNN’s president, said he has no regrets about the around-the-clock coverage by his network of the now-debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theory. In an interview with The New York Times, Zucker said he was “entirely comfortable” with CNN’s wall-to-wall coverage and suggested it was appropriate. “We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did,” Zucker wrote in an email.
“Maybe they don’t have a conscience,” responded Giuliani on Tuesday night. “So, who did it [started the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory]? That started somewhere. It didn’t come out of thin air. Somebody came up with the idea that they would get [former campaign chair] Paul Manafort, they were going to get Trump, and perpetrated this hoax — then a lot of people committed a lot of crimes in order to work out,” he added.
He also said, “[Former FBI head Jim] Comey has to be brain dead to have thought that the Steele dossier was a legitimate, intelligent document. It is a joke … It’s not an intelligence document. It’s a $1.1 million campaign document.”
The FBI used a collection of anti-Trump materials known as the Steele dossier to justify its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court application and renewals to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and others. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Democratic campaign used an opposition research firm, Fusion GPS, to obtain negative allegations against Trump from Russian sources, via former British spy Christopher Steele — and Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) paid for Steele’s work on it.
The president has long railed against the anti-Trump and pro-Clinton bias found within the DOJ and FBI and decried special counsel Robert Mueller’s “witch hunt” against him.
Giuliani noted some of the “absurd things” mentioned in the dossier, including that the now-disgraced attorney “Michael Cohen was in Prague on a specific date. How difficult is it to call up the State Department” and find that out?
“They didn’t want to,” pointed out Ingraham. “They didn’t want to check it.”
“Why not check it?” said Giuliani. “They’re supposed to do that.”
Ingraham noted that criticisms of Bill Barr are now circulating among Democrats. “Before he talked about Trump, everybody loved Bill Barr,” she said. Now, however, given the Mueller report findings, some are asserting Barr “inserted himself in the process when he didn’t need to, and two, that he did it hastily.”
The former mayor of New York City noted it wasn’t Trump who deleted emails or smashed cell phones — as Hillary Clinton did.
Giuliani’s response was that “there is nothing political about Bill Barr. He wasn’t at the Trump victory party, like [Andrew] Weissmann was crying at Hillary’s Christmas party. He didn’t run the Trump Foundation like Jeannie Rhee, who worked for Mueller, ran the Clinton Foundation. That’s where the political partisans were. Bill Barr is a professional law-enforcement guy, [a] professional lawyer. He happens to be attorney general the way Michael Mukasey was attorney general. Not the political operatives like Clinton, like Obama had. So, I don’t get it. But in any event, the decision was also made by [Rod] Rosenstein. [Assistant attorney general] Rosenstein started this investigation.”
Both then mentioned that Trump himself wants the full Mueller report released.
“I know what’s in it,” Giuliani told Ingraham. “God Almighty, you don’t think after all these months, we don’t have a pretty good idea of what’s in there, having debated with him, talked to him about it?”
The former mayor of New York City then noted that it wasn’t Trump who deleted emails or smashed cell phones — as Hillary Clinton did.
“He didn’t delete 30,000 emails. He didn’t bust up [an email] server.”
“He didn’t have a hammer. He didn’t take a hammer to his cellphone.”
He also referenced a recent poll saying that 50 percent of the American people thought the Mueller investigation was indeed a witch hunt, as Trump has maintained.
And “as long as those polls are within striking distance, they’re not going to impeach him. And today, even on CNN, they [had] two political experts, Democrats, on, saying impeachment is out of the question now.”
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