Another tell
by digby
Plenty of people, including yours truly, noticed the similarity of tone when Trump knows he’s been caught dead to rights in a lie about a possible criminal act. Instead of his normal defiance, he takes the posture of total innocence that sounds completely inauthentic.
I wrote this a couple of weeks ago:
Remember when Trump denied that he knew anything about the Stormy payment?
Note the tone of voice. Well, in that NY Times interview he adopts exactly the same tone when he says this:
HABERMAN: “Did you ever talked to him about Wikileaks?
TRUMP: “No. No. I didn’t. I never did.”
HABERMAN: “Did you ever tell him or other people to get in touch with him?”
TRUMP: “Never did.”
This is a tell. It’s the tone of voice you hear from a five-year-old with chocolate all over his face denying that he ate the candy. All innocence, brief and breezy as if he hasn’t a care in the world.
Listen to the at 12:10. It’s uncanny.
He told him.
Check out the tone when he said this:
BAKER: Has Attorney General [Matthew] Whitaker given you any indication of whether you face any exposure in this investigation?
TRUMP: No.
HABERMAN: Or your family?
TRUMP: I don’t even talk to him about it.
HABERMAN: You never talk to Matt Whitaker?
TRUMP: I don’t talk to him about it. How can you have exposure when you haven’t done anything? I had nothing to do with any of this, other than that I was a good candidate that won an election.
HABERMAN: Has Rod Rosenstein given you any sense over the course of the last year about whether you have any exposure, either in — or there’s any concerns, or whether you’re a target of the Mueller report?
TRUMP: Well he told the attorneys that I’m not a subject, I’m not a target.
HABERMAN: He told your attorneys?
TRUMP: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
HABERMAN: Did he say that about the S.D.N.Y. [Southern District of New York] investigation, too?
TRUMP: About which?
HABERMAN: The S.D.N.Y. investigation. Because there’s two. There’s Mueller, and then there’s the Cohen investigation.
TRUMP: I don’t know about that. That I don’t know about.
HABERMAN: Rod has never said anything to you about whether you’re a target at all in terms of what they were looking for on Cohen? Has that ever come up?
TRUMP: No. I don’t. We didn’t discuss it.
It’s right at the beginning of this segment:
He talked to Whitaker, not Rosenstein…
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