Despite the best efforts of two of FNC’s most loyal Trumpers, Rudy Giuliani could not rehab this morning's train wreck interviews about Trump collusion.

As The Washington Post reported, Giuliani’s morning appearances on CNN and Fox News made bizarre arguments that moved the goalpost from “Trump didn’t collude” to “Collusion is not a crime.” That seemed to be an attempt to get out in front of evidence that, despite repeated denials, Trump knew in advance about his campaign’s top officials meeting with Kremlin-connected Russians at Trump Tower in June, 2016.

The most notable portion of the interviews was when Giuliani rekindled the idea that collusion isn’t even a crime. Trump’s defenders have occasionally noted that the word doesn’t appear in the criminal code — which is true but misleading—but Giuliani took it a step further: He basically suggested Trump would have had to pay for Russia to interfere on his behalf.

“I don’t even know if that’s a crime — colluding with Russians,” Giuliani said on CNN. “Hacking is the crime. The president didn’t hack. He didn’t pay for the hacking.”

[…]

Giuliani seems to be guarding against the idea that Trump actually did know about the meeting — by arguing that he wasn’t in the room and even that working with the Russians wouldn’t be criminal.

That’s a pretty remarkable distance from where all these denials began.

Unfortunately for Trump, Giuliani’s later attempts to prove he had not moved the goalpost as well as his attempt to debunk an allegedly forthcoming claim that Trump was at a second meeting in which the upcoming Trump Tower meeting was discussed only served to befuddle Outnumbered cohosts and Trump loyalists, Harris Faulkner and Melissa Francis.

When he called in to Outnumbered, Giuliani made the disingenuous argument that he had not moved any goalpost. He also falsely claimed that the “illegitimate” Russia investigation “began with Peter Strzok.” Not a single cohost challenged those statements. That included Democrat Adrienne Elrod who compliantly remained silent while the four conservatives around her tried to assist the rehab.

Apparently, the point of Giuliani’s 25-minute phoner was to walk back his claim that there was a Trump-campaign planning meeting in advance of the meeting with the Russians.

However, Giuliani’s message was so muddled, neither Faulkner nor Francis understood what the heck he was trying to say. In a moment that will almost surely get replayed, Francis tried to figure out why Giuliani kept saying Trump was not at a meeting nobody asked if he was at.

FRANCIS: Why are you saying the president wasn’t at the meeting? I understand those two meetings that you just set out there but that doesn’t explain why you’re saying he wasn’t there. Who asked if he was there? No one asked if he was there.

Finally, Faulkner prodded Giuliani to give his “latest take” on the meeting between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Giuliani said it had been “described already by Donald Jr.” and “I think Jared [Kushner]” and that it “led to nothing.” Faulkner helpfully added, “That’s the one that people really key in on and you’ve given us information about things that are not in the bloodstream of America yet and now they are.”

Next, Faulkner tossed to cohost Guy Benson who got Giuliani to clarify that it’s still his position there was no collusion with the Russians. Then Benson asked Giuliani to “say again for the record” that Trump “did not know about the existence of that meeting prior to it occurring.”

Giuliani hedged in his response:

GIULIANI: I’m glad you asked that. It’s very, very clear, yes. And let me make one slight amendment. When I say the Trump campaign, I mean the upper levels of the Trump campaign. I have no reason to believe anybody else did. The only ones I checked with were obviously the top four or five people.

Rather than follow up on that suggestion that plenty of other high-level campaign officials, just maybe not highest-level, might have known about the meeting, Faulkner tossed to Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery. She threw Giuliani the lifeline of changing the subject to what special counsel Robert Mueller might want to ask Trump.

Watch Giuliani fail at rehab in even a friendly Fox interview below, from the July 29, 2018 Outnumbered.