Collusion of dunces

Rudy Giuliani, the President's lawyer, laid down the new line Monday morning: “I have been sitting here looking in the federal code trying to find collusion as a crime. Collusion is not a crime.”

He has a very narrow technical point; the colloquial term that often used to characterize the possibility that the Trump campaign may have held hands with the Kremlin as Russia meddled in the 2016 elections is not written in statute.

But “conspiracy against the United States” is; look up 18 U.S.C. Section 371, which happens to be a charge on which former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort is standing trial.

It is a federal crime to “conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.”

While we don't know what we don't know, that could describe the actions of either Donald Trump or those in his campaign orbit.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller, for example, could be looking at Trump's role in drafting a false statement on why his aides met at Trump Tower with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who had promised damaging dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Two days before that meeting, Trump called for Russia to find Clinton's deleted emails. The next day, the hacking of DNC emails began.

Giuliani admits that the hack was a criminal act. What if Trump had prior knowledge of that crime or actively encouraged it?

Over to you, Rudy.