Donald Trump’s allies mounted an often-harried offensive Sunday, seeking to redirect growing criticism around the Republican presidential nominee’s tax returns into an unusual argument for his unparalleled business acumen.

“The man’s a genius,” Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and close adviser to Trump, said Sunday when asked on CNN’s “State of the Union” about a New York Times report detailing Trump’s use of tax provisions that could have helped him minimize what he pays in federal income taxes. “He knows how to operate the tax code for the people that he’s serving.”

In this case, Giuliani said, Trump was simply acting as any responsible American businessman would to save money for his enterprises. Trump’s investors, he added, could have brought legal action against the Manhattan businessman had he not taken advantage of the tax law’s provisions.

The Times report, published late Saturday and based on documents obtained by the newspaper, showed that Trump had declared a

$916 million loss on his 1995 tax returns, which could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes over an 18-year period.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, another adviser to Trump, argued that rather than demonstrating any kind of malfeasance, the tax records published by the Times showed Trump to be uniquely qualified to overhaul the federal tax code.

Not only that, Christie said, but the documents supporting the report illustrate Trump’s success in what the governor characterized as the weak economic climate of the early 1990s.

“This is a guy who, when lots of businesses went out of business in the early 1990s, he fought and clawed back to build another fortune, to create tens of thousands of more jobs,” Christie said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“This is actually a very, very good story for Donald Trump.”

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, used her Twitter feed Sunday to release a “Trump ‘Smart’ Tax Calculator” to show how much users would pay in taxes “if you paid the same as ‘billionaire’ Donald Trump.” The answer at different income levels reaching into the tens of millions came up as zero.