Rachel Maddow shares video of Mike Pence making excuses for Donald Trump's praise of WikiLeaks in which Pence claims to only "now" be aware of WikiLeaks' history prior to 2016.
Even by Trump standards, this was ridiculously untrue, and the lie led to ample coverage of the Republican's enthusiastic embrace of WikiLeaks – which was very much his "thing" – when it was disseminating materials stolen by Russia in order to help Trump gain power.
Vice President Mike Pence tried to defend Trump's nonsensical stance, arguing that the president simply "welcomed information" from WikiLeaks, but never endorsed it. Not surprisingly, this defense didn't exactly prove persuasive.
And so the president's press secretary rolled out a new defense yesterday.
If there's one thing we know about Donald J. Trump, it's that his comedic stylings are unrivaled, right?
Look, this is absurd. he obviously wasn't kidding. As we discussed last week, Trump professed his "love" of WikiLeaks. He encouraged Americans to go to WikiLeaks in order to see materials that were stolen by Russian intelligence operatives. He complained when news organizations failed to promote WikiLeaks' materials to his satisfaction.
He cited WikiLeaks 141 times in the last month of his 2016 presidential campaign.
Sanders yesterday said Trump "was making a joke," which made it sound as if the future president simply mentioned this once for a laugh. Reality shows otherwise.
This wasn't a story I intended to return to, but Team Trump keeps making it worse.