For months Corey Lewandowski has stated that he didn’t authorize or approve anyone in the Trump campaign going to Russia on their behalf. He told this explicitly to USA Today.
Corey Lewandowski, who was President Trump’s campaign manager until June 20, 2016, in an interview with USA TODAY on Monday both denied granting Page permission to travel to Moscow in his capacity as a private individual and also said he couldn't remember whether he had or not. In that interview, Lewandowski gave a litany of contradictory answers about Page's involvement in the campaign.
“I'm very clear about this," he said. "I granted nobody permission to do that."
Lewandowski said he has never had a conversation with Page and has never met him. However, he said he was unsure whether he had communicated with Page by email.
“I can’t say unequivocally I’ve never responded to an email to somebody,” Lewandowski said.
But now thanks to Carter Page’s extensive testimony to the House Intel Committee Lewandowski says his “memory has been refreshed” and he’s now telling a completely different story.
Appearing, of course, on Fox News Lewandowski now says something else entirely and claims that he didn’t remember Page’s email previously because it was Father’s Day, and also just one day before he was fired by the campaign.
“You have to remember, in the context of the campaign world––now, my memory has been refreshed, but to be clear, from what I understand and what I recall, that email was sent on June 19th of 2016, so about 18 months ago,” Lewandowski said. “It also happened to be Father’s Day on a Sunday, and it also happened to be the day prior to me being terminated from the campaign, so with all due respect, there were many other things on my mind that day other than trying to understand why a volunteer was telling me he may or may not be traveling outside the country.”
June 19th, 2016.
Well since I keep a Master Timeline of the Trump Russia Investigation I looked that date up and found a couple other interesting things.
For starters that same day, June 19th, was when George Papadopoulos — who had already travelled to Moscow on April 18th and had been introduced to a person with connections to the Russia Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) — received an email from his MFA contact saying that if Trump himself couldn’t travel to Moscow “perhaps that he or another campaign rep could attend.”
So that’s a mighty huge coincidence, but lets remember also that during the previous month, In May, Lewandowski, Manafort and Gates had been discussing many of Papadopoulos various contacts and their specific request to have Trump travel to Moscow himself.
- May 2016
- The Russian MFA connection emails Papadopoulos and says he has talked to his colleagues at MFA and that they are “open for cooperation”, George then relates this to a “High Rank” member of the campaign (Manafort) as “Russia Updates.” They continue communicating during the Month via email and Skype. Some of his emails are forwarded by Manafort to Gates “Let[‘]s discuss, We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”
So it’s not that much of a stretch to question that this suggestion to send someone “low level” was communicated back to the MFA contact and that when he agreed on June 19th Carter Page — who already had plans to travel to Moscow — was dispatched in Trump’s place.
Lewandowski is correct that he was indeed fired the next day for the controversy of him forcibly yanking a Brietbart reporter away from Trump by the arm, but something else that happened that day was that Christopher Steele wrote the very first of his memos to the FBI talking about contacts between members of the Trump campaign and Russia operatives — which has been confirmed by the Papadopoulos’ guilty plea.
- Steele Memo June 20, 2016— [6 Days after Wapo’s first report on DNC hack]
- Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by Putin, has been to encourage splits and divisions in the Western alliance.
- Source A stated that Kremlin has been feeding Trump and his team valuable intel on his opponents including Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for several years. This was confirmed by Source D, a close associate of Trump’s who had organized his recent trips to Moscow noting Russian Intel had been “very helpful”.
According to the Washington Post “Source D” is Sergei Millian and they have independently confirmed this portion of Steele’s dossier.
In June, a Belarusan American businessman who goes by the name Sergei Millian shared some tantalizing claims about Donald Trump.
Trump had a long-standing relationship with Russian officials, Millian told an associate, and those officials were now feeding Trump damaging information about his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Millian said that the information provided to Trump had been “very helpful.”
...
The allegations by Millian — whose role was first reported by the Wall Street Journal and has been confirmed by The Washington Post — were central to the dossier compiled by the former spy, Christopher Steele. While the dossier has not been verified and its claims have been denied by Trump, Steele’s document said that Millian’s assertions had been corroborated by other sources, including in the Russian government and former intelligence sources.
So it seems that Millian was basically in contact with Papadopoulos and may very likely have been his “MFA Contact” IMO — the very same person who had been coordinating with his trip, and perhaps Page’s trip, himself — was talking to someone linked to Chris Steele. Whoopsie!
These people, Manafort, Gates, Lewandowski, Papadopoulos and Page have all been lying about their contacts with Russia for more than a year, now we have clear evidence of those lies.
