Rudy Giuliani Backs Off Remarks on Potential Collusion by Trump Aides – The New York Times

The president agreed with him in a subsequent Twitter post, and added that Hillary Clinton, his former Democratic rival, was the one who was doing the colluding.

Mr. Trump has long maintained that his campaign never aided Russia’s meddling, even as the special counsel inquiry has revealed communications between Russians and some Trump campaign aides.

While the word “collusion” has no defined legal meaning, in plain English, it means working together, typically in secret, to do something illicit. And whether Mr. Trump knew during the campaign of any Russian attempts to disrupt the election has been a central question in the investigation that started in the summer of 2016.

Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, was prepared to tell prosecutors that Mr. Trump knew about a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower that was arranged so campaign officials could get damaging information on Mrs. Clinton from Russians.

The president and his lawyers have denied that Mr. Trump had any knowledge of the meeting until July 2017, when The New York Times was preparing to publish an article about it.

At the time, when the White House was scrambling to prepare a statement about the Trump Tower meeting in response to The Times’s article, Mr. Trump met with President Vladimir V. Putin for more than two hours in Hamburg, Germany, where they were attending an economic summit meeting. Later that day, Mr. Trump sought out the Russian leader during a summit meeting dinner. Only interpreters, the secretary of state at the time, Rex W. Tillerson, and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, were in the first meeting with Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin. Afterward, Mr. Trump took his interpreter’s notes and told the interpreter not to tell anyone what was discussed. No American officials were present for the second encounter during the dinner.

The following day, while Mr. Trump traveled back to Washington on Air Force One, he called a Times reporter to say that the Russians had been falsely accused by American intelligence agencies of hacking during the campaign. The president also huddled with his aides to draft a statement in response to the article about the Trump Tower meeting and personally dictated a misleading account that the meeting was about Russian adoptions. He did not admit that the meeting was arranged to address Russia’s offer to help his campaign, which emails later obtained by The Times confirmed.