CNN Panel Gets Heated After Jack Kingston Says Stormy Daniels Engaged in ‘Soft Blackmail’
A CNN panel this morning got a bit heated after former Congressman Jack Kingston defended President Trump on the Stormy Daniels payment.
The panel kicked off right after CNN’s Victor Blackwell used gumballs to highlight the number of lies from the President, with Blackwell asking Kingston, “Are you proud of that?”
Kingston conceded that there’s a lot of “misstatements” from the White House, but added it’s “not unique to this presidency.” He brought up Bill Clinton as an example.
Democratic strategist Maria Cardona, meanwhile, called Trump “the pants-on-fire President that is presiding over a dumpster fire administration.”
Blackwell brought up the Rudy Giuliani mess this week concerning the payment to Stormy Daniels, and the new reporting that Trump actually did know about the payment months before he publicly denied it.
Kington began by swiping at the New York Times report, saying the paper “has not gone out of its way to be accurate on President Trump.”
Blackwell pressed Kingston on the president being contradictory on this issue. Here’s how Kingston responded:
“One time when I was in Congress, I had an electrician doing work for me at my house. We had a dispute over his work and he said, ‘Well, you know what? I don’t care if I’m right or wrong, I’m gonna go public with it and it’s gonna embarrass you as a congressman.’ I know that public figures, officeholders, and celebrities… often get this kind of soft blackmail from people. Clearly that’s what Stormy Daniels was doing. That’s why they had to do the NDA to begin with.”
“What?!” Cardona asked.
Kingston went on to say that Cohen clearly had a retainer to “make problems go away, and you don’t necessarily know where all that retainer goes.”
Blackwell again confronted Kingston about the contradiction from the President. Kingston again insisted that Trump may have known about money but not about where it went.
But when they got back onto the subject of Trump’s lies, Kingston said a lot of Trump supporters don’t care, adding, “People are not looking at Washington for moral purity. They’re looking for results.”
Watch above, via CNN.
[image via screengrab]
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