March 20, 2017

Spicer Claims Scandal-Plagued Trump Campaign Chair “Played a Very Limited Role”

His comments came in response to new questions about Trump-Russia ties.

Carlo Allegri/ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


While the directors of the FBI and the NSA were testifying before Congress about Russian meddling in the presidential election, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer offered some curious spin on the ties between Russia and associates of President Donald Trump.

In a press briefing, Spicer said that Paul Manafort, who performed controversial work for pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians from 2007 to 2012, “played a very limited role [on the Trump campaign] for a very limited amount of time.”

In fact, Manafort was involved with the campaign from March to August 2016 and served as campaign chairman starting in June, after campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was fired. He resigned in August after the New York Times reported on his ties to Russia. After he resigned, Trump’s son Eric called him “amazing,” and Trump himself thanked Manafort for “his great work in helping us to get where we are today, and in particular his work guiding us through the delegate and convention process.”

Even after his resignation, Manafort was reportedly “heavily involved with staffing” Trump’s incoming administration. The Daily Beast reported that he was talking to Trump every day during the transition.

Spicer also tried to downplay some of the other contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials. “There was a discussion, I heard some names [thrown] around before, that were hangers-on around the campaign,” Spicer said. “At some point, people that got thrown around at the beginning of this hearing, some of those names, the greatest amount of interaction that they’ve had is have cease-and-desist letters sent to them.” In response to a subsequent question, Spicer said he was referring to Roger Stone and Carter Page. Stone is a longtime informal Trump adviser who remains an ardent Trump booster and claimed a legal back channel to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. Page was an unpaid foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign who had extensive ties to Russia and met with Russian officials.

Spicer also seemed to downplay the role that retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn played in the campaign, referring to him as a “volunteer.” Flynn was one of Trump’s key national security advisers during the campaign and was reportedly one of several people Trump brought along to national security briefings he received in the run-up to the election. Flynn was reportedly a “regular presence” at Trump campaign events and was on the short list for vice president. Trump named Flynn national security adviser after he took office. Flynn lasted just 24 days before he was forced to resign after it was revealed that he misled Vice President Mike Pence about his communications the Russian ambassador to the US during the transition period.

Later in the briefing, Spicer said that he wasn’t “dismissing Paul Manafort as a hanger-on,” but he added, “For the entire final stretch of the general election, he was not involved. So to start to look at some individual that was there for a short period of time or, separately, individuals who really didn’t play any role in the campaign, and to suggest that those are the basis for anything, is a bit ridiculous.”

This post has been updated.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate