Chris Cuomo Has Epic Battle With Corey Lewandowski Over Russia Ties: ‘Nonsense!’
CNN’s Chris Cuomo battled former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski on New Day Tuesday morning in an epic bout over the campaign’s ties to Russia and latest developments in the investigation.
Things got heated right off the bat, as Cuomo asked Lewandowski if he accepts “the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia tried to interfere and did so during the election.”
Lewandowski replied that while the Russians “did try to impact the election,” they actually did so through “the Clinton campaign.”
“Hold on a second. So you’re are saying that you accept the intelligence community’s assessment. But you are saying that the dynamic was that the interference was conducted through the Clinton campaign? That is a notion that doesn’t meet any standard or any piece of proof that we’ve gotten from the investigators to date,” Cuomo shot back.
“I get the spin,” he added.
The two then embarked on a marathon sparring session over the standards of opposition research, Lewandowski’s denials of any contact between the Trump campaign and Russia, his eventual retraction of those denials, as well as the role staffers like George Papadopoulos and Carter Page played in the Trump campaign.
Lewandowski held that to the best of his knowledge, he never “communicated with anybody who was a Russian, Russian agent, Russian supporter or somebody who was from the Russian government in any way, shape or form.”
Later in the segment, Cuomo grilled Lewandowski on Monday’s report that Donald Trump Jr. was in contact with Wikileaks during the campaign, but when the former campaign manager deflected, Cuomo cried: “That’s all nonsense!”
Somehow, the two eventually got onto the subject of Hillary Clinton’s campaign overlooking Wisconsin and Michigan, to which an exhausted Cuomo asked “so what?”
“Who is bringing up why she lost?” Cuomo asked. “I am talking about what Russia did to interfere with the election.”
Lewandowski then asked Cuomo if he believed “Russia had a material impact on the outcome of this election,” to which Cuomo replied “I have no idea.”
“The way you run around from these questions and distract to Hillary Clinton or distract to Barack Obama doesn’t help,” Cuomo continued. “And it makes me suspicious.”
“You’ve just been spending a lot of airtime talking about oppo research by the Clinton campaign as a connection to Russian interference, which is preposterous.”
Lewandowski finally protested that Cuomo is talking about “something that happened a year ago.”
At the end of the segment, a gracious Cuomo gave Lewandowski one line to discuss his soon-to-be released book, Let Trump be Trump.
[image via screengrab]
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