H.R. McMaster changes story on Donald Trump’s meeting with the Russians
When it first emerged earlier this week that Donald Trump had given highly classified information to the Russians during a Oval Office meeting, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster was the one guy in the White House willing to go out and tell reporters it didn’t happen. It was a stunning moment, because we all knew he was lying, and up to that point many of us had thought he was one of the few people in the Trump administration could be trusted. Now he’s changing his story.
The trouble for McMaster is that when he claimed “I was in the room” by way of asserting that he knew for certain Trump hadn’t given anything to the Russians, he was committing himself to having been a witness to the entire conversation. So when it came out later this week that Trump also told the Russians that recently fired FBI Director James Comey was a “nut job,” it led to the logical question: did a decorated General like H.R. McMaster really stand there silently while Trump smeared Comey like that?
That leads to McMaster’s current conundrum, and presumably, why he changed his story entirely when he appeared this morning on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. He can’t be seen as standing by Trump’s remarks about Comey, but he’s already staked to having insisted that Trump’s classified remarks didn’t happen. So now he’s resorting to the last resort of the lying incompetent: pretending he can’t remember.
“I don’t remember exactly what the president said” is now H.R. McMaster’s official position on what took place in that meeting between Donald Trump and the Russians. Or at least that’s his position as of this morning, until he changes it again. And he was one of the few people we thought we could trust in this mess. Does the mere act of standing too close to Trump for too long cause good people to become automatically corrupted into unpatriotic liars?
