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But to get a real sense of the degree and frequency with which the White House’s story has changed, we need to rewind the tape back to just days after the 2016 election.
That was then. Over the subsequent 18 months, accounts of who from the Trump campaign met with whom, when, and for what reasons, have either conveniently evolved or reversed themselves entirely. Only the trajectory has remained the same, as Trump and his associates, with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani the most recent example, continuously raising the bar — which is almost out of sight now — for what they would accept as proof of wrongdoing.
The unqualified denials would soften over time. Even after it was revealed that his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, had misled the White House about his post-election contacts with the Russian ambassador, Trump at a press conference told reporters, “I have nothing to do with Russia,” adding: “To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with does.”
But those assertions were blown up a few months later, when the Times first reported on the campaign brain trust’s meeting with a Russian lawyer, among others, at Trump Tower in June 2016. After releasing a public statement downplaying the gathering as brief and “introductory,” focused on adoption policy, Trump Jr. changed his tune.
A few days later, Trump Jr. decided to release the emails leading up to the meeting ahead of news outlets, effectively confirming reports he’d initially denied. Perhaps the most memorable exchange came right at the beginning, on June 3, 2016, when British publicist Rob Goldstone informed Trump Jr. that someone with ties to the Russian government had “some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”
The mixed, and ultimately misleading, initial public messages about the Trump Tower meeting marked the unofficial end of the blanket denial era.
And that’s true, up to a point. There is nothing in the criminal code that forbids or even legally defines “collusion.” As former FBI director James Comey put it during a CNN town hall last month, “collusion is actually not a thing that exists under the federal laws of the United States. I had never heard the term until it appeared in the media.” Still, the framing of the conversation has — with a push from the Trump team — now moved from, as Hicks put it, “There was no communication between the campaign and any foreign entity during the campaign,” to the suggestion that, even if there was, it wasn’t necessarily illegal.
Over the past several days, Giuliani has argued that, even as Trump claims to be raring for a sitdown with Mueller and his team, the investigators do not have the power to compel his testimony. It’s a legally dubious assertion given that past presidents have been subject to subpoenas, though none was compelled to sit down for an interview as part of a criminal investigation.
Whether Trump could be indicted is a stickier question. Giuliani told CNN last week that the Mueller team had “acknowledged” such a move wasn’t on the table. “All they get to do is write a report,” Giuliani said. “They can’t indict. At least they acknowledged that to us after some battling, they acknowledged that to us.” But there is no settled law here, just past DOJ opinions.
That’s the status quo. The rest is just posturing. On the eve of the one-year anniversary of Mueller’s appointment, Giuliani pretty well summed up the state of Trump’s defense during an appearance on Fox News.
“When I ran (for office), they were looking for dirt on me every day. That’s what you do. Maybe you shouldn’t. But you do it,” he said. “There is nothing illegal about that. Even if it comes from a Russian or a German or American, it doesn’t matter.”
That, crossed with Trump’s long and ongoing Twitter campaign to discredit the probe as a “witch hunt,” is the long and short of it. For all the drama and infighting, Trump and his team, even as it changes, has proven to be both agile and, well, creative.
No matter what comes down the pike, they have a rationalization or deflection ready to go — even when it goes against the substance of what they once claimed.
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