After that spectacular three-week run of chaos that followed his promotion to the president's legal team, Rudy Giuliani had become a relatively quiet player in the Russia circus, perhaps because Trump banished him to the Kellyanne Conway wing of windowless basement offices and ordered him not to emerge unless he heard the fire alarm and smelled smoke. On Monday, however—a week after Michael Cohen claimed that Trump was indeed aware of the infamous dirt-on-Clinton meeting that Don Jr. swore Dad knew nothing about—Giuliani made his triumphant return to cable news, only to promptly remind his benefactor why Giuliani should never be allowed on cable news again.

His argument, as developed in a pair of appearances on CNN and Fox News, proceeded in two parts. "Colluding about Russians? I don't even know if that's a crime," he said, offending both syntax and the well-established concept of criminal conspiracy in the same breath. The only relevant offense, insisted the man who served as a federal prosecutor during a long-ago, marginally-less-shameful phase of his career, is "hacking." And because noted non-computer-user Donald Trump did not personally hack Hillary Clinton's e-mails, and because he did not pay American dollars to Russian intelligence officers or anyone else to hack Hillary Clinton's e-mails on his behalf, none of his actions can be unlawful.

When asked about Cohen's meeting-adjacent allegations, Giuliani produced a trusty straw man from his breast pocket and dismembered it in dramatic fashion. "I'm happy to tell Mueller that Trump wasn't at the Trump Tower meeting," he declared on CNN, thereby rebutting an argument that literally no one has made. He offered the same take on Fox & Friends: Trump "did not participate in any meeting about the Russia transaction," he explained as his hosts nodded intently, as if trying to follow Grandpa's story about a fishing trip that occurred in 1953, "and the other people at the meeting that he claims he had without the president about it say he was never there." On the topic of whether Trump signed off on his son, his son-in-law, and his campaign manager sitting down with shadowy Russian figures in order to obtain damaging information about his chief political opponent, Giuliani remained notably silent.

It's hard to know how diligently to parse anything that Rudy Giuliani says or does, in the same way that divining whether an agitated golden retriever puppy needs to eat, has to poop, or just wants to run around in frantic circles for a while is always, at best, a matter of inelegant guesswork. It remains very possible that these elisions are simply another product of Giuliani's well-established incompetence.

But the arguments he made on Monday present obvious opportunities for the future: By asserting that "hacking" is the operative crime, he lays the groundwork for alleging that evidence of collusion is legally irrelevant, if such evidence were to come to light sometime in the not-too-distant future. Similarly, by treating Trump's presence or absence in the room as indicative of his culpability, Giuliani is attempting to make the president's awareness of the meeting—something that Trump and his son have repeatedly denied—a lot less important. This is the sort of trick to which even bad lawyers know to resort when they understand that neither the facts nor the law are on their side: Talk about something else as loudly as you can, and hope no one notices that you're full of shit.

Watch:

The One Crucial Question Trump Refuses to Answer