Two things happened over the weekend that complicate our understanding of President Trump’s awareness of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The first is that Trump was interviewed by Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro. She raised the question of collusion — that is, whether elements of the Trump campaign assisted the Russian effort to influence the results of the 2016 election.
“After 18 months, not any kind of reference to any collusion,” Pirro said.
To which Trump replied:
“That is true, Jeanine. You have all these committees, everybody’s looking. There is no collusion. No phone calls — I had no phone calls, no meetings, no nothing. There is no collusion. I say it all the time. Anybody that asks. There is no collusion.”
For some time, it’s been unclear exactly what Trump means when he says there was “no collusion” (as he
often does). In January, the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman
asked press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders what exactly was meant when Trump used the term.
“Look,” Sanders replied, “I think he’s stating for himself and to anything that he would be a part of, or know about, or have sanctioned. But that would be something that, again, I think he’s very clearly laid out he and his campaign had nothing to do with.”
To Pirro, Trump used a narrower definition: He himself made no phone calls and had no meetings related to Russian interference.
What that
doesn’t cover, though, is whether there was tacit awareness of Russian interference efforts. Was Trump told that the Russians were trying to help him, perhaps even told about specific actions or information, and did nothing?
A review of Trump’s public comments from the database at
Factba.se reveals no specific denial by Trump since Election Day that he knew about Russian interference during 2016.