What really happened at the platform meeting?by digby
One of the stranger aspects of the whole Russia scandal was that weird platform meeting at the GOP convention. And the guy who did it is changing his story.
Via Business Insider:
The Trump campaign’s national-security policy representative for the Republican National Convention, J.D. Gordon, told CNN on Thursday that he pushed to alter an amendment to the GOP’s draft policy on Ukraine at the Republican National Convention last year to further align it with President Donald Trump’s views.
Gordon’s remarks represent a dramatic shift from previous comments, and they come as Attorney General Jeff Sessions faces intense scrutiny over two previously undisclosed meetings with Russia’s ambassador to the US — one of which was timed to the convention.
In January, Gordon told Business Insider that he “never left” his “assigned side table” nor spoke publicly at the GOP national security subcommittee meeting, where the amendment — which originally called for “providing lethal defense weapons” to the Ukrainian army to fend off Russian-backed separatists — was read aloud, debated, and ultimately watered down to “providing appropriate assistance” to Ukraine.
According to CNN’s Jim Acosta, however, Gordon said that at the RNC he and others “advocated for the GOP platform to include language against arming Ukrainians against pro-Russian rebels” because “this was in line with Trump’s views, expressed at a March national security meeting at the unfinished Trump hotel” in Washington, DC.
“Gordon says Trump said at the meeting … that he didn’t want to go to ‘World War Three’ over Ukraine,” Acosta said.
Trump’s apparent involvement in steering the language change — Gordon reportedly told CNN that “this was the language Donald Trump himself wanted and advocated for back in March [2016]” — is also at odds with what Gordon told Business Insider in January, when he said “neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Manafort were involved in those sort of details, as they’ve made clear.”
When asked why he told Acosta that Trump did weigh in on the subject, when he told BI in January that neither Trump nor Manafort were involved, Gordon emphasized that he had told BI that Trump was not involved “in the details” of the platform.
“Meaning they weren’t part of the process to write, draft, edit the document, or weigh in with the delegates at all,” Gordon said in an email. “That said, the overarching thought of better relations with Russia was certainly their strategic position.”