Jerome Corsi's ill-advised tour of cable news shows continues, with a stop over at MSNBC's "The Beat" with Ari Melber. What started off as a nice and friendly chat ended with Melber flatly stating that Corsi lies, is a liar, lies all the time, lies about his lies and continues to lie. He even dove into Corsi's insane "birther" conspiracy theory.
Corsi admitted to Ari that he did know about the types of emails that Julian Assange and Wikileaks had, but he swears that it just "came to him" while he was on an airplane with his wife heading to a vacation in Europe. Somehow he just *sensed it*. Ari wasn't having it. He then, and this is where is gets dicey for him legally, admitted to Ari that he lied about everything at first and that he coordinated with Roger Stone but he swears he is telling the truth now.
Directly following the interview, Melber convened a panel of brilliant legal minds to decipher Corsi's interview and talk about how much legal jeopardy he really is in. Nick Akerman, of Watergate fame, had some excellent points to make.
First, a clip from just moments before where Corsi admitted to the Grand Jury that he had lied.
CORSI: In front of the Grand Jury, Aaron Zelinsky said "Doctor Corsi, was that a lie?" I said "was this a lie? yes." So I openly admitted to them that in their terms this was a lie.
MELBER: Why did you do that?
CORSI: Because it was the truth.
MELBER: And why did Roger Stone want you to lie about the Podesta information?
CORSI: You have to ask Roger Stone because at Harvard I neglected to take the mind reading course.
The panel was not impressed, Nick Akerman in particular:
MELBER: Now I'm here with several experts. Watergate prosecutor Nick Ackerman, Matt Miller, who worked at the Justice Department and another former federal prosecutor, Paul Butler back with me. Nick?
ACKERMAN: Let me start off with my legal opinion. Liar, liar, pants on fire. This guy is not telling the truth. First of all, when you look at somebody and you decide whether they're telling the truth, you don't leave your common sense at the door post. What he says about suddenly coming up with the exact timing for the Podesta e-mails to come out doesn't ring true. But what I think is the real killer here that really puts the lie to him is that later on between January 13, 2017 and March 1, 2017, he deleted those e-mails. The very e-mails that you were questioning him about that had to do with these contacts with Julian Assange.
MELBER: You're saying the proof at the time about trying to get the goods is stuff that he tried to hide?
ACKERMAN: And he did, he deleted it. and he deleted it -- that time period is extremely significant because that's when the Congressional Committee, the Senate Committee, was bringing in Roger Stone and was starting to ask questions about this. This is not something that somebody forgets. You don't forget the fact you're asked to make a contact with Julian Assange. I mean, how many times do people in America suddenly decide "oh, i'm going to speak to julian assange?" It's not something you forget when you're called to a Senate Committee and you wind up destroying the very evidence that shows that you were right in the middle of this whole thing.
The question is this: how will we even know when Corsi is telling the truth if everything he says is a lie or a variation of a lie or a correction to a lie? This man peddles lies and conspiracy theories and when asked to produce evidence to support the truth, he can't because he conveniently deleted it. Hopefully Mueller can get to the bottom of it. Sometimes reality is crazier than fiction.
