Editor’s Note: Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM radio’s daily program “The Dean Obeidallah Show” and a columnist for The Daily Beast. Follow him @DeanObeidallah. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles on CNN.
There was a time Rudy Giuliani was viewed as a crime-fighting US attorney and later as the valiant mayor of New York in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks. But that Rudy is long gone. And all that remains is a man who will be best known for his work as a pathetic shill for Donald Trump.
We saw another example of this on Sunday when Giuliani, appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” in his capacity as Trump’s personal lawyer, gave a master class in deceit as he discussed Robert Mueller’s report.
First, Giuliani tried to make Americans think there’s nothing wrong with a campaign for president of the United States accepting help from Russians. This came up in the discussion of the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting attended by Donald Trump Jr., then Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner in the hopes of obtaining “dirt” on Hillary Clinton from Russian nationals.
In fact, the email to Trump Jr. that prompted that meeting promised not just helpful info from foreign nationals but from the Russian government itself, as it offered the Trump campaign, “some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father” that was all “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”
Giuliani defended the Trump campaign accepting help from Russians by stating, “Any candidate in the whole world in America would take information,” causing Tapper to ask, “From a foreign source? From a hostile foreign source?” Giuliani shot back, “Who said it’s even illegal?”
A few moments later when pressed again by Tapper on a presidential candidate getting help from Russians in the 2016 campaign, Giuliani responded adamantly, “No, no, there’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians! It depends on where it came from.”