Jane Raskin told the Senate impeachment trial on Monday afternoon that Rudy Giuliani’s role in Ukraine was not political, but to prepare a defense for his client, President Donald Trump, against Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into “Russia collusion.”

Raskin, who serves as private counsel to the president, told the Senate that House Democrat impeachment managers had misled them by portraying Giuliani as a political hatchet man.

In fact, she said, the “obvious” explanation of Giuliani’s role emerged from the evidence Democrats had gathered themselves: he was acting in his capacity as the president’s personal defense lawyer. He did what every other defense lawyer would have done: he followed a lead from a private investigator to pursue information that might be useful to protecting his client from forthcoming allegations.

Rather than carrying out what Democrats called a “conspiracy” in Ukraine, Giuliani’s role had been to debunk the actual conspiracy — namely, “Russia collusion.”

Raskin’s argument to the Senate was perhaps the first time the White House has explicitly identified itself what Giuliani’s role had been.

She closed: “The House managers may not like [Giuliani’s] style. You may not like his style. But one might argue that he is everything Clarence Darrow said a defense lawyer should be: outrageous, irreverent, blasphemous, a rogue, a renegade.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.