Saunders: Trump sure doesn’t act like there was ‘no collusion’

To be sure, few Washingtonians had bought the official White House line. But the Holt interview was a disaster as it revealed a chief executive who had used top members of his team to peddle a narrative he knew to be false — with little concern for their reputations.

Trump effectively corroborated what his critics suspected — that the Rosenstein memo was a beard — just because he felt like it. It was a betrayal breathtaking in its lack of utility.

Last month, The New York Times ran a story that suggested Rosenstein felt poorly used in the Comey firing — which may have been a factor in his decision to designate former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel days later. A Department of Justice spokeswoman denied the link.

In his book, “The Briefing: Politics, the Press and the President,” former White House press secretary Sean Spicer wrote about the difficulty he had lining up Republicans who would defend the Comey firing the night it happened.

“We got a universal, 100 percent ‘no’ from Republican Senators,” Spicer wrote, a response for which he credited the White House’s failure to notify and consult GOP members.

Trump has used Twitter to ask valid questions about the Russian probe. Why couldn’t Mueller have found a Trump donor to join the many Clinton donors in his stable of lawyers? The Democratic National Committee and Clinton bankrolled the unverified “dossier” cited by prosecutors — is that collusion?

This is getting old

Alas, Trump being Trump means not leaving well enough alone. Wednesday the president took to Twitter to urge Sessions, who recused himself from the Russian probe, to “stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now.” He brought himself back to the dark days of May 2017 when Washington waited to see if he would try to impede a federal investigation.

While D.C. Democrats slammed the Twitter rant as another attempt to obstruct justice, many in the usual chorus of cable news Trump boosters were eerily silent.

“The last thing that the Republicans need is to look like they are covering up for the president,” explained Mark Corallo, who briefly worked as a spokesman for Trump’s Russia legal team.

And it doesn’t help that Trump leaned on Sessions on the heels of the July joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin at which Trump repeated Putin’s claim that Russia did not meddle in the 2016 election. “He just said it’s not Russia,” Trump said. “I will say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

Is this again Trump just being Trump? Because it’s getting old. If there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian actors, why doesn’t Trump act like it?