Appearing on This Week immediately after Trump's morning tweets, Trump attorney Jay Sekulow tried his level best to avoid saying that Donald Trump directly lied to him about his involvement in crafting a statement downplaying the significance of the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Russian government-sent intermediaries and the topmost members of the Trump campaign, a meeting that Trump now admits was set up as an effort to "get information on" his election opponent.
Trump, during his return trip from a 2017 G20 summit, helped craft a statement for his son Donald Jr. in which he, or they, dismissed the meeting as instead being about "the adoption of Russian children." Sekulow had denied at the time that Trump was involved, leading George Stephanopoulos to this morning ask the obvious question: When did you learn that that denial wasn't true?
Sekulow's answer was instructive.
Well, let me tell you two things on that one. Number one, as you know, George, 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 -- I had bad information at that time and made a mistake in my statement. I’ve talked about that before. That happens when you have cases like this.
As far as when did we correct it, the important part is the information that we’ve shared with the Office of Special Counsel -- I’m not going to get into the details -- but we were very clear as to the situation involving that trip and the -- and the statements that were made to the New York Times. So I think it’s very important to point out that in a situation like this, you have -- over time, facts develop.
Sekulow starts out distancing himself from the mess by saying that by golly, he had just gotten there when all this awkwardness took place. But his main personal defense to this charge of lying is that he "had bad information at that time", and there's only one place information about whether Donald Trump did or did not conspire to draft a misleading excuse for the Trump Tower meeting: His client, the Oval Office garbage fire.
Interestingly, Sekulow wants to make very sure to emphasize that when Trump's team did find out the facts were not as Donald Trump had previously claimed them to be, his lawyers let the Office of Special Counsel know that they needed a do-over on that one. That appears to be the legal fig leaf that they'll be using on this one: We may have lied to the American people, and boy howdy did we ever, but we corrected it once it was clear investigators had found us out.
But his closing assertion, that over time, facts develop, is a humdinger. There's only one fact at issue here: Whether Donald Trump, while serving as president and immediately after a private meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, drafted all or part of a statement released under his son's name falsely claiming a meeting between Russian agents and top Trump campaign officials was about "adoptions." That's not a nuanced question. Did Trump help write it, or did he not? We soon learned he did, but Trump's legal team may have been the last to know.
The odds are 100% that Jay Sekulow stays up late at night wondering what else Donald Trump might have lied to his lawyers about.
