On Tuesday, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, in one of the first steps in an impeachment inquiry opened by congressional Democrats. He refused to answer many questions the committee's Democrats asked him, while Republicans like Matt Gaetz pitched him open-ended softballs so he could rail against the entire hearing.
In one of the few answers he voluntarily gave, Lewandowski confirmed part of the Mueller report, saying that Trump asked him to pressure then attorney general Jeff Sessions to restrict the scope of Robert Mueller's investigation. Democratic counsel Barry Berke then played Lewandowski a clip from February, in which Lewandowski himself told Ari Melber in an interview on MSNBC that he couldn't remember Trump ever asking him to get involved. When Berke asked him, "That wasn't true, was it?" Lewandowski replied, under oath, "I have no obligation to be honest with the media because they are just as dishonest as anybody else."
A confession like that should embarrass any network that gave Lewandowski air time, especially CNN, which hired him as a contributor early in 2016 after he left the Trump campaign. Instead, he was invited to appear on CNN's New Day on Wednesday morning, where he asserted that the Mueller report cleared Trump of any allegation of obstruction or collusion.
Despite the many times that Trump has said the same thing, it's completely false. Host Alisyn Camerota tried to push back:
Lewandowski: By the way, the Mueller report was very clear: There was no collusion, there was no obstruction.
Camerota: That's not what the Mueller report said, Corey!
Lewandowski: It absolutely says that.
Camerota: Corey.
Lewandowski: You should read page—you should read the page that it states that on.
Camerota: Wait a second, time out, time out. Did you read the Mueller report?
Lewandowski: No, I never did.
Camerota: Then how do you know what it says?
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What the Mueller report actually says is that investigators couldn't bring any charges against a sitting U.S. president, not that there were no charges to bring. As Mueller himself very deliberately put it, "If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so."
To recap, the morning after Lewandowski says he's free to lie to the press as much as he wants, CNN invites him on air to lie about a report that he hasn't read, and he proceeds to call every fact-check of his claims "disingenuous." It's not clear what insight viewers were supposed to gain from the segment, or if there was any public interest served by providing a platform to a man who once sarcastically said "womp womp" to news of a 10-year-old migrant with Down Syndrome being locked up in a border camp, but here we are.
