An ex-FBI chief of staff under former agency director James Comey on Monday poured cold water on Rudy Giuliani’s claim that collusion is not a crime.
"Collusion is a crime. We just happen to call it something else, we call it conspiracy, but it is absolutely a crime," Chuck Rosenberg, who once led the Drug Enforcement Administration, said on MSNBC’s "MTP Daily."
Earlier, Giuliani, who is representing President Donald Trump in special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing Russia investigation, insisted that collusion is not a crime.
"I have been sitting here looking in the federal code trying to find collusion as a crime,” Giuliani said on "Fox & Friends." "Collusion is not a crime."
Rosenberg told MSNBC: "You probably won’t find the word bank heist in the criminal code, but bank robbery is a crime, too, and so I’m sort of perplexed that it’s come down to synonyms. I mean, really? These are synonyms.
"And if these folks don’t know that collusion and conspiracy are synonyms for one another, and this is a legal strategy, then they might want to consider changing horses in this race."
Early Tuesday, Trump trumpeted Giuliani’s claim, tweeting: "Collusion is not a crime."