Trump Cites Lanny Davis, Reasserts He ‘Did NOT Know’ About Trump Tower Meeting
President Donald Trump’s cited Lanny Davis’s record correction this morning and restated he did NOT know about the infamous Trump Tower meeting that occurred months before the 2016 General Election. The meeting is at the center of the investigation into whether or not the Trump campaign worked with Russian efforts to interfere in the U.S. election as top Trump campaign officials Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner all attended a meeting with Russian agents.
Lanny Davis, who has been representing former Trump Organization lawyer Michael Cohen, had previously claimed that his client knew that Trump as aware of the meeting, but has since clarified that Cohen is unaware of Trump’s foreknowledge of the meeting. This was the essence of Trump’s Saturday morning tweet:
Michaels Cohen’s attorney clarified the record, saying his client does not know if President Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting (out of which came nothing!). The answer is that I did NOT know about the meeting. Just another phony story by the Fake News Media!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 25, 2018
By any objective measure, last week was a disastrous news week for President Trump as his former campaign manager Manafort was found guilty of eight counts of bank and tax fraud, and his former attorney Cohen pled guilty to campaign finance crimes and directly implicated Trump as a co-conspirator. But neither of these items have come from the investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is specifically looking into alleged Russian collusion, an allegation that Trump and his allies have virulently rejected.
If Trump, in fact, knew that his top campaign officials were meeting with Russian agents who had promised dirt on Trump’s political foe, Hillary Clinton, that would be a difficult thing for Trump to explain, particularly after denying it for so long. The fact that Trump cited his legal and political foe Mr. Davis suggests Trump is perhaps grasping at any exculpatory straws.
