The following article by Ashley Parker was posted on the Washington Post website June 4, 2018:
Both President Trump’s legal and political teams were vigorous in their denials: The president had absolutely not dictated a misleading statement on behalf of his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., to explain away a controversial meeting he had with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower.
“Apart from being of no consequence, the characterizations are misinformed, inaccurate, and not pertinent,” Jay Sekulow, one Trump’s personal attorneys at the time, said in response to a Washington Post story last summer that first reported the president’s role in dictating his son’s response.
And from White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders: “He certainly didn’t dictate, but he — like I said, he weighed in, offered suggestion like any father would do.”
The only problem? That wasn’t the truth.
In a January memo to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, first reported by the New York Times on Saturday, two of Trump’s then-lawyers — including Sekulow — revealed that the president had, in fact, “dictated a short but accurate response” on behalf of Trump Jr.
And on ABC’s “This Week” last Sunday, when pressed about the shifting explanations, Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani offered an inadvertent window into the White House’s credibility problem, quipping: “I mean, this is the reason you don’t let the president testify.”
The admission that Trump dictated his son’s statement is the latest example of where on a number of key issues — especially pegged to Mueller’s ongoing Russia probe and Trump’s legal difficulties — the White House and the president’s lawyers have offered contradicting stories and whipsaw about-faces, often revealing the truth only weeks later, when confronted with their inconsistencies.
“One of the challenges right now is to disentangle these versions, some of which have come to us directly through the president, some of which have come to us through very good reporting, and some of which reflect the inner defense of the Trump legal team,” said Tim Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University who previously served as the director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. “I believe that the initial stories emerged when this was a one-man presidency. Now there’s more of a legal team that’s trying to protect him from his own words.”
The result, Naftali added, can be dizzying.
“I think his team is trying to come up with a theory to explain all of these Trump exhortations in a way that doesn’t make him seem guilty of obstruction of justice, and that requires strenuous verbal gymnastics,” he said.
The obfuscation began before Trump officially took office, amid reports that his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, had potentially inappropriate contacts with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions against Moscow.
Amid the first wave of news stories, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary at the time, vigorously denied the reports, saying Flynn had merely “reached out” to Kislyak on Christmas Day to wish him “a merry Christmas and a happy New Year,” and then again several days later to begin setting up a call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Vice President Pence appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation” in mid-January to unequivocally deny that Flynn had done anything wrong. Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak, Pence said, “had nothing whatsoever to do with those sanctions.” (When The Washington Post first reported in February that Flynn had privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with Kislyak during Trump’s transition, the vice president’s team said Pence was not lying and had simply been misled).
Flynn also publicly denied he had discussed sanctions with Kislyak and twice told The Washington Post “no” when asked in an interview if he had ever done so.
Despite having been briefed by Justice Department officials that Flynn misled senior administration officials about his conversations with Kislyak and could be a blackmail risk a full two weeks prior, the White House continued to defend him — and took no steps to remove him — until the news broke in the press.
Flynn then resigned — punishment, White House officials said, for misleading Pence. He later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Kislyak.
Trump also seemed to offer conflicting stories about why he fired then-FBI Director James B. Comey in May 2017. When he fired Comey, the president said in a letter that he was letting the FBI director go because of Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
Yet two days later, in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Trump suggested he had another motive — the FBI director’s role in overseeing a counterintelligence investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
“In fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won,’ ” Trump told Holt.
Then, in a tweet last month, the president seemed to contradict his Holt interview, again reversing course and claiming, “Not that it matters but I never fired James Comey because of Russia!”
On Monday, Sanders twice declined to explain her earlier denial — undercut by the president’s lawyers — that Trump had dictated aboard Air Force One the misleading statement about his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer who was expected to provide dirt on Clinton to help Trump’s campaign.
She repeatedly referred the media’s questions to the president’s outside counsel, prompting one exasperated reporter to say, “But in August, you said it.”
And the list marches on.
In March, after the New York Times reported an upcoming shake-up of Trump’s legal team, the president vociferously denied the story in a duo of tweets, arguing the paper “purposely wrote a false story stating that I am unhappy with my legal team on the Russia case and am going to add another lawyer to help out. Wrong.”
But the story was accurate. Less than two weeks after his tweet, John Dowd, one of his personal attorneys, resigned, and Ty Cobb, his White House lawyer handling the probe, stepped down shortly thereafter, in early May — a decision related to one of the new lawyers Trump had decided to bring aboard.
And last month, in a friendly interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, Giuliani contradicted Trump’s previous assertion that the president was unaware that Michael Cohen, his personal attorney, had paid $130,000 to adult-film star Stormy Daniels just days before the 2016 election to prevent her from publicly accusing Trump of an extramarital affair.
Giuliani told Hannity that Trump actually had reimbursed Cohen for his payments to Daniels.
At the time, Trump was not pleased, saying he hoped Giuliani would soon get his “facts straight.”