MSNBC political Mike Barnicle said Rudy Giulini's stunning admission about Trump campaign collusion puts the president's son under new scrutiny.
Panelists on "Morning Joe" spent much of Thursday's episode sifting through statements made the night before by President Donald Trump's attorney, who admitted some members of the campaign had engaged in collusion -- but not the president himself.
"(Special counsel Robbert) Mueller will have to weigh what Giuliani said versus what President Trump said," said BBC anchor Katty Kay, who said every TV appearance by the president's attorney probably added two weeks to investigators' work.
"Now there is this weight of evidence that (former Trump campaign chairman Paul) Manafort took this polling data and handed it to Russian operatives, and we don't know whether that was a strategy on behalf of that campaign or was that just Paul Manafort trying to protect his own interests to curry favor with some of these oligarchs," she added. "There's definite connections here about a level of chaos and confusion in the campaign and people on the Trump campaign working for themselves, working for their own interests."
Barnicle said Giuliani's comments on CNN should concern Donald Trump Jr., who organized a June 2016 campaign meeting with a Russian attorney promising dirt on Hillary Clinton.
"If they are going to move the goalposts on this collusion this evening to the campaign, Donald Trump Jr. is standing right beneath those goalposts," Barnicle said.
Host Joe Scarborough said the same pattern had been playing out for nearly three years.
"I keep going back to Donald Trump saying that they never had any contact with anybody from Russia," Scarborough said. "That was a lie that they were spitting out before he was sworn in."
"Mike Pence lied and said the same thing," he added, "that nobody in the campaign had any contact whatsoever with Russia, and then, of course, there's a drip here and a drip there, and you find out that the attorney general did, you find out that Jared Kushner did, you find out other members of the administration did, you find out they left them off their declaration forms, you find out they left them out of their Senate testimony. You find out that they actually lied to the United States Senate about it, and now we're seeing it happen with collusion -- it goes from contact to collusion."