In a pre-inaugural press conference last year, Donald Trump insisted that he deliberately “stayed away” from possible deals with Russia in order to avoid a possible “conflict.” It was an odd thing for him to lie about.
As has been well documented, during his Republican presidential campaign, Trump signed a letter of intent to pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project, to be financed by a sanctioned Russian bank called VTB.
Over the weekend, Rudy Giuliani, a high-profile member of the president’s legal defense team, told CNN, “It was a real estate project. There was a letter of intent to go forward, but no one signed it.”
Oops.
A newly obtained document shows President Donald Trump signed a letter of intent to move forward with negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Russia, despite his attorney Rudy Giuliani claiming on Sunday the document was never signed.
CNN’s Chris Cuomo obtained a copy of the signed letter of intent that set the stage for negotiations for Trump condominiums, a hotel and commercial property in the heart of Moscow. The letter is dated October 28, 2015, and bears the President’s signature.
Incidentally, Trump signed the letter of intent for the Moscow project literally the exact same day as he participated in a Republican presidential primary debate.
In this case, the fact that CNN obtained the letter doesn’t shed important new light on the underlying story, since the details of the letter have been available for quite a while. What’s of interest, though, is why Trump, and now Giuliani, have made false claims about the effort.
Apparently trying to clean up the mess, the former mayor tried a very different line with the New York Daily News.
President Trump signed a “bulls–t” letter of intent to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 campaign, Rudy Giuliani conceded Tuesday — just two days after the former New York mayor claimed the missive had not been signed.
Giuliani refused to acknowledge he told CNN’s Dana Bash on camera Sunday that Trump didn’t put his John Hancock on the Oct. 28, 2015 letter.
“I don’t think I said nobody signed it,” Giuliani told the Daily News, even though he literally told Bash “no one signed” the letter.
In a stunning contradiction, Giuliani told The News that “of course” Trump signed it. “How could you send it but nobody signed it?” he said.
The president could’ve argued that he was keeping his financial interests open in 2015 and 2016, in part because he expected to lose, so he pursued a Moscow project that ended up falling through. As such, there’s no meaningful controversy here.
Except that’s not what Trump argued. On the contrary, he and his team have instead made bewilderingly false claims in response to this story.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."