Rachel Maddow asked one very smart question during her show that highlighted the admission through a slight change in language of Trump campaign/Russia collusion.
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Rachel Maddow asked one very smart question during her show that highlighted the admission through a slight change in of Trump campaign/Russia collusion. https://t.co/dKDGZ9TTC0 #Maddow pic.twitter.com/06p4HckVaJ
— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) May 2, 2018
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Maddow asked Carol Leonning of The Washington Post, “The president sometimes says things on Twitter that pushes the envelope a bit. This seems strange, after The New York Times published this list of 49 questions more than a dozen of which were about potential contacts between his campaign and Russia during the campaign, which is — that’s the collusion question, the president is asserting that those questions don’t exist, that that line of questioning doesn’t exist. I have to ask if that makes it hard to follow his lead in terms of running a legal strategy in this matter.”
Leonning’s answer was that Trump is changing his definition of collusion, “I don’t know if it’s so much a legal strategy as a pr but let’s break open your smart question, Rachel, which is the questions that focus on collusion and the president’s claim that no questions have to do with collusion. So everyone’s got their own different interpretation, and even today, in our reporting, Bob and I were struck by how the goalpost keeps moving about what “No collusion” means. For example, some people who represent the president and/or advocate for him have been telling us for a long time there was absolutely no collusion, no evidence of collusion with the Trump campaign. That’s now slowly changed to, there’s absolutely no collusion involving the president. It’s a slight shift but it leaves out a lot of people.”
The difference in the two answers is an admission of collusion
Trump world has gone from saying that there was never any collusion to saying, there was no collusion involving Trump. The distinction between those two answers is gigantic. One answer is a statement that the president and his campaign are innocent. The other answer suggests that the president might be innocent, but not his campaign. Rachel Maddow asked an insightful question and the answer she got blew the lid off of Trump’s changing Russia collusion story.
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Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
