‘Who’s Lying Here?’ CNN’s Sara Sidner Confronts Trump Lawyer Over Bombshell Admissions at Town Hall

CNN anchor Sara Sidner confronted Trump attorney Jim Trusty over statement ex-President Donald Trump made during CNN Town Hall that many experts agree incriminated him further.

The CNN town hall at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire last week was a chaotic spectacle that sparked a barrage of criticism and recriminations at the network. But several well-versed observers also pointed out that Trump made news with a series of potentially incriminating statements about the documents case, among others.

At one point, Trump even lost it and attacked Collins as a “NASTY person,” triggered as she pressed him hard on the Special Counsel Jack Smith-led probe.

On Wednesday night’s edition of CNN Primetime, Sidner interviewed Trusty and confronted him with something Trump said at the Town Hall that contradicted a sworn statement by the attorney and asked, “Who’s lying here?”:

SIDNER: You also signed a letter arguing the former president didn’t know what was in the boxes.

But here’s what he told Kaitlan Collins.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: When we left Washington, we had the boxes lined up on the sidewalk outside for everybody. People are taking pictures of them. Everybody knew we were taking those boxes. And the GSA, the Government Service, the GSA was the one taking them. They brought them down to Mar-a-Lago.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: So you signed this letter, and Donald Trump now says this. Who’s lying here?

TRUSTY: Nobody’s lying here. Nice try. That’s like, when did you stop beating your wife?

But the bottom line is, President Trump didn’t sit there and fold up documents and newspapers and pictures of Celine Dion and put them into boxes for transport. There was a whole bunch of people that worked at the White House, that helped with the White House that packed up materials and sent them to Mar-a-Lago while he was still president.

So we’re not going to sit here and pretend that President Trump personally looked at every single box. He knows the general nature, that there are golf shirts and there are golf scoring cards and that there are pictures of Celine Dion. He knows from the unprecedented and unwarranted and unconstitutional search of Mar-a-Lago that they took things like passports that had nothing to do with anything, tax records, medical records.

This was a fishing expedition by prosecutors who were engaged in persecution, not following evidence, but criminalizing a noncriminal dispute. And if we let this genie out of the bottle, it’s going to come back to haunt generations, where we don’t have executive privilege, we don’t have attorney-client privilege, where we create new rules for Donald Trump because people in power and people in federal law enforcement want to go after him.

SIDNER: So…

TRUSTY: So, that’s the message of our letter. That’s the message — well, go ahead.

SIDNER: That you were sending to Congress.

So, I guess the question is, you know, why should a president — no president is above the law. No one in this country is supposed to be above the law. So, why is he able to just ignore a subpoena? Should that be OK?

TRUSTY: He didn’t ignore subpoenas.

We talked about the 15 boxes. We talked about the fact that, in every other case in history, it is a long, drawn-out process of negotiation. That probably explains the patience NARA had with the 2018 letter from Obama. And it said: We have millions of documents, including classified ones. You will get them eventually.

SIDNER: OK. But after the FBI — after the FBI asked for the boxes, they came back to find 15 more boxes.

And so they did not pay attention to the subpoena. So, why is that OK, is what I’m asking.

TRUSTY: The last…

SIDNER: If I did that as a citizen, there would be hell to pay.

TRUSTY: Well, you also don’t have the powers under the Presidential Records Act for declassification. And I’m pretty sure you’re not — not president right now.

But let me just say this. You are ignoring the fact that, for the first time in history, a weaponized DOJ, much like the one described in the Durham report, with the same culture, maybe not always the same individuals, they decided to use the Presidential Records Act as a Trojan horse, get inside Mar-a-Lago, pretend that there’s some problem there.

By the way, the last time the president had contact with DOJ, before that subpoena, he said, attorney, show them where this stuff is in the storage room. The attorney did that, and he said to the official that has led much of the charge here, the trophy hunt, if you need anything else, just ask.

He was in a negotiating stance from the beginning through the end. They said, put a lock on that door. And then they were the first ones to go quiet and break the lock two months later in an unprecedented raid. This is the only president that would face this type of ends-justify-the-means behavior.

And as one of his attorneys, we’re going to fight it.

SIDNER: All right, Jim Trusty.

The DOJ would have a very different story about that. The FBI certainly disputes what you just said.

But I thank you for coming on. I appreciate your time.

TRUSTY: Through their leaks, they certainly have.

But thank you.

Watch above via CNN Primetime .