Why Trump Wins When the Conversation Turns to What's Legal
Through a series of confusing and often contradictory statements over the last three days, President Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani have kept to one consistent theme: Collusion with a foreign power is not a crime. As the president crisply put it Tuesday morning:
Collusion is not a crime, but that doesn’t matter because there was No Collusion (except by Crooked Hillary and the Democrats)!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2018
On a superficial level, this argument is flawed. As Giuliani acknowledged, in one of several moments of excessive candor on Monday, it’s a version of the classic hack defense lawyer’s argument, “My client didn’t do it, and even if he did it, it’s not a crime.”
Yet despite its facial weaknesses, the Trump team’s lawyerly parsing is part of a broader and highly successful effort to launder a long catalog of political and personal misconduct into a dry legal dispute. Instead of defending a series
