How much other "bad information" has Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow fed to the public in defense of his client? After his boss basically just tweeted a confession to committing conspiracy this Sunday morning, Sekulow made an appearance on ABC's This Week, and did an extremely poor job of damage control when asked about his previous statements about the meeting:
STEPHANOPOULOS: You said the president wasn’t involved in any way at all. Later, Sarah Sanders changed that. She said oh yes, the president weighed in but didn’t dictate anything. And then in January of this year, the president’s legal team, including you, sent a memo to Robert Mueller saying this. You have received all the notes, communications and testimony indicating that the president did dictate a short but accurate response to the New York Times article on behalf of his son.
So why did you deny President Trump’s involvement? When did you learn that the denial wasn’t true?
SEKULOW: Well, let me tell you two things on that one. Number one, as you know, George, I was in the case at that point, what? A couple of weeks. And there was a lot of information that was gathering and as my colleague Rudy Giuliani said, I had -- I had bad information at that time and made a mistake in my statement. I’ve talked about that before. That happens when you have cases like this.
As far as when did we correct it, the important part is the information that we’ve shared with the Office of Special Counsel -- I’m not going to get into the details -- but we were very clear as to the situation involving that trip and the -- and the statements that were made to the New York Times. So I think it’s very important to point out that in a situation like this, you have -- over time, facts develop.
That’s what investigations do. I agreed to go on your network and others days within being retained on this and had a lot of information to process. I got that one wrong. So what does that mean? Well, for the purpose of, again, an investigation, it doesn’t mean illegality, it doesn’t mean criminality. I think one of the things that we’ve learned here, George, after what now? A -- over a year of this investigation is there has been no evidence put forward by anyone at this point that we’ve seen.
And we’ve seen 1.4 million documents, we’ve provided 32 witness interviews of any type of collusion on behalf of the president and the Russians. You know what we have seen, though? One of the most irregular investigations in U.S. history. And I think --
(CROSSTALK)
STEPHANOPOULOS: -- you’ve talked about -- you talked about the irregularities --
SEKULOW: -- Republican, Democrat or whatever, you can’t -- what (ph) you can’t ignore it.
STEPHANOPOULOS: No, I -- I understand that and I gave you a chance to --
SEKULOW: Well, you have to (ph) -- how can you ignore it?
STEPHANOPOULOS: And I gave you a chance to explain all the irregularities you thought you saw in the investigation. I asked you about that. You said no collusion. At first the White House said that there were no contacts with Russians. We now know there were at least 80 contacts. If the White House or anyone connected to the Trump campaign accepted information from the Russians, that could potentially be collusion. That would be -- that could be considered collusion, could be considered participating with a conspiracy.
So that’s also -- that’s also the possibility of a legal violation there as well. But I do want to ask you about --
(CROSSTALK)
SEKULOW: -- in that allegation, though, you’d have to -- the -- the so-called collusion, which by the way is not a legal term, that’s now what results in a -- a-- a issue of criminality. I mean, that’s just one theory (ph). And by the way, you know, the phrasing here, especially at this late date is very important. So everyone is still talking about this collusion concept. And when Rudy Giuliani said collusion’s not a crime, that was again rather unremarkable.
What was the fact? I mean what was the fact? Well the facts that we know is what is the violation or what violation has anybody put forward of an actual federal statute that’s been violated by the – by the president of the United States?
And we’ve yet to seen (ph) it, and as I said, we’ve seen an awful lot of it.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well that’s one of the things that Robert Mueller’s investigating. I agree with you on that.
