Rudy Giuliani. Photo Credit: teapartycheer.com Rudy Giuliani has often been viewed by his critics as offering confusing and perhaps even contradictory narratives in his public defense of his high-profile client, President Donald Trump. But a rhetorical shift, in statements given over the weekend and early Monday, may also signal that the Trump legal team is backing off its blanket denial of collusion with Russian actors in the 2016 campaign. Giuliani revived an argument Monday morning that Trump's lawyers and cable news defenders have advanced before: collusion is not a federal crime. Giuliani's comments came after reports that Michael Cohen would be willing to tell special counsel Robert Mueller III that Trump had approved a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and others close to Trump and Russians who had offered dirt on Hillary Clinton. “I've been sitting here looking in the federal code, trying to find collusion as a crime. Collusion is not a crime,” he told Fox & Friends . He also told CNN : “I don't even know if that's a crime— colluding about Russians. You start analyzing the crime—the hacking is the crime. The president didn't hack.” Still, for Giuliani and Trump, who has denied collusion in tweets around four dozen times, including frequently tweeting the phrase “no collusion,” it was a rhetorical shift. “It's a retreat from what we've been hearing for a year: the mantra of 'no collusion.' Now we're taking a step back and saying that, even if that's the case that there was collusion, it's not a crime,” Bill Jeffress, a partner at Baker Botts , said. “[B]ut both require knowledge of an unlawful act,” Jeffress said. So the DNC hacking could be a good case of collusion under the law, but that's going to require proof that the Trump campaign was a party to the hacking or the distribution of hacked materials. Arent Fox partner Peter Zeidenberg said he expected Mueller to zero in on the circumstances revolving around the June 2016 meeting, and whether they meet that definition of conspiracy. Privilege 'Reasserted'? Giuliani over the weekend also resuscitated a concern over attorney-client privilege that had appeared resolved by both court filings and public reporting. The issue arose when a recording, made by Cohen during a conversation with then-candidate Trump, became public earlier in July. On it, the two can be heard discussing possibly purchasing the publishing rights to former Playboy model Karen McDougal's allegations she had an affair with the future president. During a television interview with ABC , Giuliani claimed Cohen violated Trump's attorney-client privilege by allegedly releasing the recording, even as Trump's legal team has declined to do legal battle over privilege issues in open court. News of the tape's existence first became public on July 20, with media reports rolling out ever-greater details of the captured conversation until one of Cohen's attorneys, private attorney Lanny Davis, went on CNN with the actual recording itself. According to Jones' court filing on July 23, she was in the process of reviewing 12 “audio items” flagged by at least one of the parties as privileged. Then, the same day the recording became public, the privilege designations were withdrawn. According to reports , the conversation that was released was among those 12, and that it was Trump's legal team that withdrew the privilege claims. Another possibility of interest came up during conversations with the New York Law Journal. Throughout the special master's privilege review, whenever a disagreement over privilege has arose between the parties and Jones, invariably the parties have opted not to bring it before U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood. That pattern continued over the weekend, when Jones alerted the court that yet another tranche of material was released to the government after review—this included 28 items that were at first contested, but which saw the privilege concerns dropped rather than bringing them into open court. The 12 audio recordings were still under review before July 20, and Jones had yet to decide if the privilege asserted was legitimate. One possibility raised by attorneys is that federal prosecutors made clear they would be willing to assert the crime-fraud exception to get access to the material. In such a scenario, Trump's team may have been willing to abandon the privilege assertion rather than litigate the nature of the exception. That would jibe with Giuliani's early claim that the public recording proved Trump had done nothing wrong. Giuliani did not immediately respond to requests for comment.