MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace said it's beyond question that President Donald Trump's family members and campaign officials tried to collude with Russia.
The former Bush administration staffer and Republican campaign adviser said the president's son had already admitted to trying to gain an improper advantage from a foreign adversary by agreeing to meet with a Russian government lawyer promising damaging information against Hillary Clinton.
"I have never, ever, ever, been in receipt from anything from Russians," Wallace said on "Morning Joe." "Russia is an American adversary, and it's an extreme and black-and-white example of the kind of information that you would never touch."
She said campaigns are prohibited from accepting foreign assistance, even from allies like the U.K. and Israel, but she said the Trump campaign had clearly violated norms, and possibly the law.
"You don't take anything from a foreign government," Wallace said. "If someone contacts you, you call authorities. This idea that everyone does it, it might be why Rudy (Giuliani) never got very far, with all due respect, in the campaigns he waged. It is not standard operating procedure, not just on presidential campaigns, but on any campaign."
Jim VandeHei, the co-founder and CEO of Axios, said Donald Trump Jr. had shown intent to collude in his response to an email offering the campaign meeting with a Russian attorney.
"It's not just that they got the email, look what they did once they got the email," VandeHei said. "They said, 'Hey, love it, want to meet?' Not only meet -- 'Come over to my dad's tower, and guess who I'm going to bring along? The entire leadership of the campaign, so we can have a conversation about it. And then afterwards, maybe we'll have the president go on Air Force One and have to come up with a cover story to be able to talk about it that freaked out the rest of the staff.'"
He said Giuliani and the president were trying to "muddy the waters" because they know where special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation would inevitably lead.
"It's going to end up in a massive showdown where they need to discredit everything that Mueller does," VandeHei said. "I think they've been fairly effective at that. If you look at how Republicans view this and how many Republicans stand behind him, at the end of the day, this is all going to be about."
Wallace said the essential question of the Mueller investigation -- did the Trump campaign collude with Russia? -- had already been answered.
"It does end the debate," she said. "You used the term yesterday, 'collusion curious,' it does end the debate about whether or not they tried to collude -- they tried, it's over, there's no more secrets, the whodunit is over. They tried to collude with Russia. Whether or not they succeeded, I imagine that's the open question. Whether or not they knew what they were doing, I'm willing to to accept that's an open question. But did they attempt to collude with Russia? Clearly."
