Without Evidence, Trump Accuses NBC’s Lester Holt of “Fudging” Interview

He also appeared to admit that he has indeed considered firing both Mueller and Sessions.

Ron Sachs/ZUMA

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President Donald Trump on Thursday accused NBC’s Lester Holt of “fudging the tape” of the May 2017 interview during which the president admitted he planned to fire former FBI director James Comey regardless of the Justice Department’s recommendation, directly contradicting the White House’s initial statements.

That extraordinary admission, along with the president’s disclosure to Holt that the “Russia thing” had been on his mind before firing Comey, has reportedly been at the center of the special counsel’s investigation into whether Trump has attempted to obstruct justice.

The president did not offer any evidence to back any allegation of the tape being manipulated. He instead sought to remind the public that he was “not under investigation.”

In something of a follow-up to his Wednesday tweet announcing the forthcoming departure of White House counsel Don McGahn, Trump denied reports that McGahn had persuaded him not to fire special counsel Robert Mueller and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. But the president’s tweet, which misspelled the word “counsel,” appeared to confirm that he has contemplated those firings, either one of which would be certain to kick off a political crisis.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1035138155794575360

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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