This weekend, the Trump team continued their campaign to rant and rave their way to success. Presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway again went on Fox News Sunday, where she lashed out with wild talking points about Donald Trump’s supposed glowing innocence in the Russia scandal.
Host Chris Wallace pointed out to her that quite simply, the president’s assertion that he’s scored total exoneration from the final report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is not true. As quoted in Attorney General William Barr’s recap, the report specifically does not exonerate him on the question of obstruction of justice.
Conway offered in response:
‘The president is probably comparing that report and the ultimate conclusions of no conspiracy, no collusion, no contact with any Russian at a campaign that I managed into its final successful stages and have always been offended that anybody would think that we would cheat, lie, steal or talk to any Russians.’
Well that’s great Kellyanne we’ll make sure to ask whether a certain line of inquiry offends you before proceeding the next time there’s a possible national security crisis enveloping United States elections.
To be clear — her characterization of the Mueller report’s conclusions is quite simply wrong. According to Barr’s run-down, his team determined that there was no criminally prosecutable cooperation or conspiracy between the Trump team and Russian agents — not that there was no contact. Plenty of evidence of contact is in the public sphere enveloping some of the president’s closest allies and even his son Donald Jr., and it’s no doubt walked through in far more detail in the almost 400 page long Mueller report, which the Justice Department has said will be available in some form for Congress (and others) to read within weeks.
The point is that the Trump team gets points for repeatedly bumbling their contacts with Russians and offers of help from the Kremlin.
Still, Conway went on, asserting of her team’s side of the Russia scandal:
‘That’s ridiculous and always was and we wasted a lot of money and a lot of time and people’s anxiety over it. What the president is also saying is — people were out there as recently as a week or days before the Barr memo was released saying that the evidence of collusion was in plain sight and the president had committed a crime.’
Wallace cut her off at about that point over the fact that she was ignoring the issue of obstruction in favor of using the conclusion of no criminally prosecutable conspiracy to dismiss the whole case. Conway eventually relented that we’ll have to wait and see the Mueller report’s full conclusions on obstruction, acknowledging that there’s more to the story than “total exoneration.”
Watch below:
Kellyanne Conway on the President saying the Mueller report totally exonerated him #FNS #muellerreport pic.twitter.com/2DYLPU5Nmq
— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) March 31, 2019
Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein took it upon themselves to exonerate the president on the obstruction allegations via the Attorney General’s recap letter, but because of the lack of immediately available explanation for their divergence from Mueller, House Democrats want answers. Barr has agreed to testify, offering dates in early May as an option.
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