“When I ran against [Hillary Clinton], they were looking for dirt on me every day,” Giuliani said. “I mean, that’s what you do. It’s—maybe you shouldn’t, but you do it. Nothing illegal about that. And even if it comes from a Russian, or a German, or an American, it doesn’t matter.”

He also argued that because, according to those in the meeting, there was no actual exchange of “dirt”—instead, lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya pressed them on the Magnitsky Act, a law detested by the Kremlin—the conversation was licit.

“And they never used it, is the main thing,” Giuliani said. “They never used it. They rejected it. If there was collusion with the Russians, they would have used it.”

Kellyanne Conway, another top White House aide, has also recently made the case that because collusion isn’t a crime, charges of collusion are irrelevant.

This is all actually a replay of last summer’s arguments. The emails that Trump Jr. released about the June 2016 meeting made clear that the Trump campaign was perfectly willing to collude, and was in fact frustrated that Veselnitskaya couldn’t deliver the goods Goldstone had implied. The president and his defenders contended that even if they had colluded, collusion was normal and even appropriate.

“He had a meeting, nothing happened with the meeting,” Trump said, referring to his eldest son. “Honestly, in a world of politics, most people are going to take that meeting. If somebody called and said, hey—and you’re a Democrat—and by the way, they have taken them—hey, I have some information on Donald Trump. You’re running against Donald Trump. Can I see you? I mean, how many people are not going to take the meeting?”

As I wrote at the time, there were a couple of flaws with the claim. First, it wasn’t clear that everyone would react that way. Former campaign staffers of both parties expressed shock that the Trump team had gone forward with the meeting, bringing up concrete examples where campaigns had gone to law enforcement in less egregious circumstances. Furthermore, although there is no crime of “collusion” per se, it is quite possible that a campaign-finance law could have been violated. Despite what Giuliani says about the source of the information not mattering, foreign nationals are prohibited from contributing to campaigns, and opposition research could represent an in-kind contribution.

The strategy of acknowledging collusion but insisting that’s OK because it is not illegal has another flaw. As with much of the discussion over Russian interference, it conflates the legal and political realms. Something can be legal while still being politically toxic; something can be illegal, but voters can shrug.

Giuliani in particular has tended to elide the distinction between the legal and political. Last month, trying to prove that Trump had not committed any campaign-finance violations, a legal argument, his account of Trump’s reimbursement to fixer Michael Cohen for a payoff to porn actress and director Stormy Daniels created a political mess. Giuliani has also adopted a strategy of attacking special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe as illegitimate and politically motivated, while largely ceding the legal arguments.