MSNBC’s Ari Melber grilled Jerome Corsi at great length in a 20+ minute interview about his rejection of the plea deal offer by Robert Mueller‘s office.
Melber drilled down on his communications with Roger Stone and what they were trying to find out about the WikiLeaks email dumps.
Corsi said he would’ve loved to see the emails, saying, “I was happy to do it and I was happy that it would benefit Donald Trump.”
Melber brought up the email from Corsi to Stone about Julian Assange planning more email dumps and the reference to John Podesta, whose emails WikiLeaks did end up releasing.
“So you tell Roger stone about Podesta,” Melber said, “he goes on the predict it and tweet about it. That was based on you?”
“I don’t know what Roger based it on,” Corsi said, “but I certainly did tell him and it could have been based on me.”
Melber brought up comments Stone made about an intermediary between him and Assange, asking Corsi if he believes that is him. Corsi said, “Sure. It was not because I talked to Assange, it was because I figured it out on my own.”
At one point Corsi said he’s “not counting on Donald Trump for anything, including a pardon.” Melber picked up on that and asked why he’s bringing up pardons.
“You were talking about it before,” Corsi responded.
“But I didn’t ask you about the pardon. You’re bringing it up,” Melber shot back. As they went back and forth on this topic, Melber said people may very well infer he’s at least angling for a pardon.
And then Melber broached the topic of Corsi’s infamous birtherism, asking Corsi directly, “Is this the same defense you are now trying to use with Mueller as you’ve used in that political operation, which is that you stand for a lie that you say you believe it, and your defense is that because you genuinely believe the lie you shouldn’t be held accountable for it?”
Corsi stood by his birtherism and told Melber, “You believe the state-warranted conventional assumption and I’m a conspiracy theorist, which was a term invented by the CIA for people who doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald, not at the peak of his game as a shooter with a used Italian rifle that didn’t shoot straight when it was made… killed Jack Kennedy shooting past a tree with three shots. I don’t believe that happened.”
As the interview wrapped up, Melber told him, “A lot of what you’ve said does not add up, and you know that because you’ve admitted that some of what you’ve said in the context of this topic are lies that you had to admit to.”
You can watch above, via MSNBC.
[image via screengrab]
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