The saga of U.S. President Donald Trump making striking admissions on Twitter continued this week. Early Sunday morning, Trump admitted in a tweet that the point of the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting involving Donald Trump Jr., Kremlin lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and others was to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. That contrasts with past comments about the meeting that the president himself had a hand in drafting and sharing with the world.
Sunday on ABC, This Week host George Stephanopolous pressed Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow about an aspect of that discrepancy. In the past, Sekulow himself had backed up the president’s innocence, claiming him to have had no part in drafting original misleading statements about the meeting. Faced with the facts, Sekulow admitted Sunday on ABC that he was wrong.
He began:
‘I was in the case at that point, what, a couple of weeks, and there was a lot of information that was gathering, and as my colleague Rudy Giuliani said, I had bad information at that time. I made a mistake in my statement. I’ve talked about that before — that happens when you have cases like this.’
Watch below.
Pres. Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow on previously denying that the president was involved in putting out a statement on the Trump Tower meeting: “I had bad information at that time and made a mistake in my statement … over time facts develop” https://t.co/GlcWTIu29g #ThisWeek pic.twitter.com/rLLHMmOs2K
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 5, 2018
Sekulow had, in mid-2017, perhaps not been on the president’s team for very long, but does he mean to suggest that their operations were so stunted and ineptitude-driven that he missed out on a major, basic fact of the scandal? Seriously? Trump hiring Marc Kasowitz as his personal lawyer in the Russia probe hit the news circuit in May of last year, and Sekulow joined later, in June. His appearance on ABC in question took place in July of 2017.
In other words, the Trump legal team had been on the president’s case for months, and according to Sekulow, they still couldn’t — or didn’t want to — get basic facts straight.
Speaking to Stephanopolous on Sunday, Sekulow continued:
‘In the information we shared with the office of the special counsel… we were very clear as to the situation involving that trip and the [Trump-dictated] statements to The New York Times. I think it’s very important to point out that in a situation like this, you have, over time, facts develop — that’s what investigations do.’
No, facts do not develop. Facts remain facts — but this statement from Sekulow certainly shines a light on why the president picked him for his team. The president’s lies are infamous. He just makes stuff up, such as his past assertions of “NO COLLUSION!”
The Trump team just recently came out with the defense that collusion is not a crime — it is — so Trump openly admitting to his team that he sought to collude with Russia on Twitter fits in with that pattern.
Sunday morning, whining about media coverage of the Trump Tower meeting, the president admitted:
‘This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere.’
The world already knew the point of the meeting — and that Trump Jr. loved it — but now the president himself has admitted to its point. In that light, the eternal question remains — “what did the president know, and when did he know it?”
Featured Image via Screenshot from the Video
