Gaslighting Trump campaign manager and soon-to-be White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told CNN's State of the Union host Jake Tapper this Sunday that the stolen DNC emails publicized by WikiLeaks had an effect on the Trump campaign, while denying they had any impact on the overall presidential election.
As Think Progress reported this weekend:
Donald Trump mentioned the Wikileaks emails at least 164 times over the last month of the campaign as part of his argument against Hillary Clinton. But desperate to avoid any taint to the legitimacy of Trump’s election, Trump now claims they had “absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election.”
That didn't stop Conway from doing her best to downplay the fact that the leaks helped to get her boss elected:
On CNN’s State of the Union host Jake Tapper played some of those 164 Trump Wikileaks citations for Conway and asked her “How can you say that the hacking had no impact on the election, when Mr. Trump kept invoking Wikileaks which was printing, publishing things that the Russians had hacked?”
Conway responded by saying “it had an effect on his debate answer and it had an effect on the Clinton campaign,” before again repeating some of the “embarrassing” things the stolen emails revealed. But she then quickly shifted gears, claiming that the “alleged attacks and aspirations to interfere with our democracy failed.”
Her reasoning: “Donald Trump won because of things having nothing to do with the hacks.” Pressed on why the campaign invoked Wikileaks if it wasn’t “to change public impressions of Hillary Clinton,” Conway shot back that Trump “didn’t need Wikileaks to convince the American people that they didn’t like her, didn’t trust her, didn’t find her to be honest.”
