During a CNN interview on Wednesday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway refused to explain why the White House initially denied that President Trump dictated Donald Trump Jr.’s misleading statement about his June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower. The president’s lawyers now acknowledge that he did in fact dictate the statement.
Asked about the contradiction, Conway said she “would repeat” what Press Secretary Sarah Sanders has said on two occasions this week.
“She’s referring it to outside counsel, and that’s where it needs to be left,” Conway said. “This is an active investigation… Sarah addressed this.”
But as host John Berman pointed out, “Sarah said she won’t address it, is what she said.”
Backed into a corner, Sanders pivoted to citing Trump’s attacks on the entire Mueller investigation.
“I think on this, everything that has to do with what the president refers to as ‘the Russia investigation, the hoax, the witch hunt’ — you should go back and look at his many tweets on the issue, you should go back and look at what he said as recently as yesterday or the day before, which is that he feels a lot of people’s lives are being ruined,” Conway said. “Nothing has been produced that implicates the president in any way.”
Conway then changed the topic to attacking CNN for reporting on the Russia investigation in the first place.
The statement that Trump’s lawyers now acknowledge the president dictated presented a misleading narrative about the Trump Tower meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer.
That statement, released last July, claimed the June 2016 meeting was “primarily” about Russian adoptions — not, as emails Trump Jr. subsequently released revealed was really the case, to obtain political dirt about Hillary Clinton.
On August 1, 2017, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told the press that Trump “certainly didn’t dictate” his son’s statement. But over the weekend, the New York Times reported on a memo written by Trump’s lawyers that acknowledges Trump in fact dictated it.
Asked to explain her August 2017 comment in light of the Times’ report this week, Sanders repeatedly refused, referring all questions about her own comments to Trump’s outside lawyers.
During another part of the CNN interview, Conway tried to punt all questions about the Russia investigation to Trump’s “outside counsel,” including Rudy Giuliani, who last weekend said he can’t speak on things that happened in the past because “our recollection keeps changing.”
Conway concluded the interview by making clear that for the White House, nothing short of evidence that the Trump campaign cooperated with Russia to hack voting machines and change votes would constitute “collusion.”
“Do you think there is any part of that investigation that will show that this impacted votes, and swung the election to Donald Trump?” Conway asked. “You know the answer is no.”
That statement represented a far cry from what Conway said in the days before Trump’s inauguration, when she falsely claimed there was “absolutely” no contact between the Trump campaign and Russians who sought to meddle in the election.