Parker: Uncle Rudy’s rare lucidity oddly sums up his gibberish

But, apparently, there was no such pre-meeting, Giuliani tried to explain on “Outnumbered.” He said he had heard about it from reporters, who had apparently heard about it from Michael Cohen, Trump’s previous attorney who now appears willing to cooperate with the Robert Mueller investigation.

Giuliani said he’d only brought up the pretend pre-meeting because he was trying to get ahead of the story.

But now, he wanted to unwind the whole thing.

Nobody can be sure

In his morning “Fox & Friends” appearance, Giuliani also had talked about collusion. Again, Cohen is reportedly prepared to tell Mueller that the president knew ahead of time about the June 9 meeting, which, if true, could suggest collusion with the Kremlin to interfere with the 2016 election. Unless Cohen or someone else can provide corroborating evidence, then Trump’s denial stands.

Giuliani scoffed at the notion that Trump knew of the meeting, and the attorney added that he doesn’t believe collusion is against the law. “I have been sitting here looking in the federal code trying to find collusion as a crime,” he said during the “Fox & Friends” interview. “Collusion is not a crime.”

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

Technically, Giuliani is correct that there’s nothing in the U.S. legal code directly related to “collusion,” and the word is not even mentioned in the administration memo that appointed Mueller as special counsel. But, as lawyer Giuliani surely knows, conspiracy to defraud the United States, if found to be the case, would be a criminal offense under 18 U.S.C. 371.

Giuliani’s convoluted dodge brought to mind the 1972 burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at Watergate and President Richard Nixon, whose fate revolved around a similar, operative question — what did he know and when did he know it? If Nixon knew in advance of the burglary, then he’d have been at least a co-conspirator if not an accessory to the crime.

One can imagine that had Giuliani been Nixon’s attorney: “I have been sitting here looking in the federal code trying to find ‘knowing about’ as a crime. … I don’t even know if that’s a crime — knowing about a break-in. Burglary is the crime. The president didn’t burgle.”

Trump may not have known about the meeting — and we may never find out. Giuliani did have one moment of lucidity when CNN’s Alisyn Camerota asked whether he could be sure that Trump didn’t know of the meeting: “Nobody can be sure of anything.”

That.

And, also, this: “What I think and what I know may be two different things,” Giuliani said.

No one would argue with that — to be sure.