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Giuliani: 'There's nothing wrong with taking information from Russians'

Washington(CNN) President Donald Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani said while he would have advised the Trump campaign to avoid Russian help, he thought there was nothing wrong with a campaign taking information from Russia.

"There's nothing wrong with taking information from Russians," Giuliani said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union."

Asked by CNN's Jake Tapper if he would have taken information from a foreign source, Giuliani said, "I probably wouldn't."

"I wasn't asked," Giuliani said. "I would have advised, just out of excess of caution, don't do it."

Giuliani's comments came in an extended rebuttal to Utah GOP Sen. Mitt Romney, who issued a statement Friday saying he was "sickened" by the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller's recently released report.

The former New York mayor -- and 2008 presidential candidate in a GOP field that included Romney -- said Romney should "stop the bull," but conceded he did not know that Romney accepted information from foreign sources.

Romney, in his statement Friday, said he took issue with both the dishonesty documented in the Mueller report and that "fellow citizens working in a campaign for president welcomed help from Russia."

"Reading the report is a sobering revelation of how far we have strayed from the aspirations and principles of the founders," Romney said.

Former US Attorney Preet Bharara, a CNN legal analyst, said in a separate interview during the same program that he hoped Giuliani would retract his statement.

"The idea that it is OK, separate and apart from it being a criminal offense, that we should be telling future candidates in the run-up to an election in 2020 that if an adversary, a foreign adversary, is offering information against a political opponent, that it's okay and right and proper and American and patriotic, it seems he's saying, to take that information and that's okay -- that's an extraordinary statement and I would hope he would retract it," Bharara said.

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