Last October, the Washington Post reported on the explosive Access Hollywood tape of Trump bragging about groping women in a conversation with TV show host Billy Bush. According to the New York Times, Trump has claimed that the tape is fake in separate talks with a senator and an adviser this year.
This is despite the fact that he apologized for what he said on the tape hours after its release and proceeded to repeatedly excuse the comments by referring to them as “locker room talk” during the last month of the election.
On Sunday, Billy Bush published an op-ed in the Times calling the president out for suggesting the voice on the recording wasn’t his.
“Of course he said it,” Bush wrote. “And we laughed along, without a single doubt that this was hypothetical hot air from America’s highest-rated bloviator. Along with Donald Trump and me, there were seven other guys present on the bus at the time, and every single one of us assumed we were listening to a crass standup act. He was performing. Surely, we thought, none of this was real.”
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In a recent briefing, White House press secretary responded to the question of whether Trump doubts the tape’s authenticity by insisting that the American public is not interested in discussing the recording any further and implied that his issue was with the media’s handling of the story. “If there’s anything that the President questions, it’s the media’s reporting on that accurately,” she said.
If Trump really is pushing this claim, it would be just one in the lengthy list of conspiracy theories he’s promoted. Saying Obama wire-tapped him during the campaign, that Ted Cruz’s father was involved with JFK’s assassination, and that Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered are just a few of his hits.
