Kellyanne Conway says the White House doesn't have a credibility problem
"Mr. Trump is compiling a record that increases the likelihood that few will believe him during a genuine crisis," the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote in the Journal's Friday edition, like, "say, a dispute over speaking with special counsel Robert Mueller or a nuclear showdown with Kim Jong Un. Mr. Trump should worry that Americans will stop believing anything he says."
Presented with this quote in the context of the Stormy Daniels payment scandal by CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway resolutely denied the Trump administration has a credibility problem. "As the counselor to the president, aren't you concerned about this?" Tapper asked. "I'm concerned you're not listening to the news I just broke," Conway shot back, "which is that [President Trump's] 'no' refers to when the [$130,000] payment [to adult film star Stormy Daniels] occurred."
In Conway's telling, the president did not know about the payment his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, made to Daniels at the time it was made, so "when the president said 'no' on Air Force One" in April, "he's saying he didn't know about it when the payment occurred. He found out about it after the fact." Trump's new personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said on television last week Trump "knew the general arrangement." Giuliani later walked back those comments.
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Watch an excerpt of Conway's interview below. Bonnie Kristian
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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