No Collusion! No Collusion! Okay, Maybe Some Collusion!

Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who used to be the mayor of New York City and is now a screaming goblin who defends a vile authoritarian nightmare on the teevee, has moved the goalpost from "No collusion!" to "There wasn't any collusion, but if there had been it would have been legal" and now to "Hey, if there were illegal collusion, it wasn't MY CLIENT!" Case closed, your honor!

Caroline Kelly at CNN reports:

Rudy Giuliani said Wednesday that he never denied [Donald] Trump's campaign colluded with the Russian government during the 2016 campaign, only that the president himself was not involved in collusion.

In an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo on Cuomo Prime Time, Giuliani, a former New York mayor and Trump's attorney, said he doesn't know if other people in the campaign, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, were working with the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential race.

"I never said there was no collusion between the campaign, or people in the campaign," Giuliani said.

He added, "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, conspiring with the Russians to hack the DNC."

It's another remarkable statement from Giuliani, given that the president and his supporters have repeatedly denied any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Again, I will note that we know Donald Trump did (and continues to) collude with the Russians, because parts of the collusion have always happened right out in the open.

Including the things that Trump is very visibly not doing — like, for example, giving a single fuck about things like this:

That's a dispatch from the Russian news agency TASS earlier this week, reporting that the Secretary of Russia's Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, threatening that Ukraine may split apart and lose its statehood, blaming the Ukrainian government in Kiev for that, despite the fact that Russia has put Ukraine under sustained military, technological, infrastructural, and informational attack for years now.

As my friend and expert on Russia and Ukraine Olga Lautman noted: "Russia has been increasing their hostilities against Ukraine and now outright threatening. Their Russian agent in the WH wont do a thing. Russia took Ukrainian sailors hostage and not a word. It's really horrifying watching this play out when it could and should have been stopped."

Looking the other way while Vladimir Putin bullishly expands the Russian empire is collusion.

Not in 2016. Not by campaign aides.

Now. By the sitting President of the United States.