Trump says he "didn't know anything" about his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, sharing polling data with a person connected to Russian intelligence pic.twitter.com/wgbHsTh3vD
Note the way he responds. There's a certain phony wide-eyed, soft-spoken denial he issues when he's lying about something when he realizes the jig is up.
Here's how he lied about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels on Airforce One.
There's a certain tone he uses in these situations and it's quite different from his normal tone of strident denial. He doesn't elaborate, and it's clear he wants to change the subject.
Meanwhile, think about this from USA Today:
Members of President Donald Trump's campaign and transition team had more than 100 contacts with Russian-linked officials, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress think tank and its Moscow Project.
CAP, a liberal think tank, used publicly available court documents and reporting to tally up the number of contacts with Russian-linked officials, which includes those with close ties to Russian President Vladiir Putin and others tied to Russian intelligence, banks and politicians.
The organizations counted each meeting and message as a separate contact.
The number of contacts was raised to 101 this week, according to CAP, after it was reported that Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, a former campaign aide, shared polling data with Manafort's former Russian business partner Konstantin Kilimnik.
Not one of the people Russian agents or other interested parties contacted over the course of that campaign ever reported it to the authorities. People who have worked on campaigns say this is utterly unique. In some cases, that's not especially concerning. They were innocuous as single events and might not have set off any alarm bells. But it became a live issue early on in the general election campaign after the DNC was hacked and the government was giving briefings to the highest levels about Russian interference. You would have thought once it became news they would have looked back and thought "hmmm, that's weird. Maybe I should tell somebody."
Not one of them reported any of these incidents, not even the ones that had to have seemed bizarre or inappropriate.
Even if this conspiracy has a dozen different strands in which none of the Trump campaign players knew the whole story (not a legal defense by the way) it's already obvious that they were both the dumbest and the most unethical presidential campaign in history. And that includes Tricky Dick's.