Sounds like his defense of his client, Michael Cohen, should be compelling.
Last week, Lanny Davis debunked a July 27 story by CNN that asserted that Cohen was willing to tell special counsel Robert Mueller that he took part in a meeting where Donald Trump, Jr. told his father about an offer to meet with a group of Russians who claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton. According to CNN’s anonymous sources, Cohen said Trump approved of the meeting, which was to be held at Trump Tower.
Now it turns out the whole thing was a fabrication. On Wednesday, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Davis point blank, “So Michael Cohen does not have information that President Trump knew about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians beforehand or even after?”
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“No, he does not,” Davis’s replied. “I think the reporting of the story got mixed up in the course of a criminal investigation.” Lest there be any doubt about his further involvement, Davis was hasty to add, “We were not the source of the story.”
Now it turns out that that was Davis’s second lie.
On Monday evening, Davis told BuzzFeed News that he regrets both his role as an anonymous source and his subsequent denial of his own involvement.
Davis told BuzzFeed News that he did, in fact, speak anonymously to CNN for its story, which cited “sources with knowledge” — meaning more than one person.
But the plot thickens further:
After Davis publicly backtracked from the claims, the New York Post and the Washington Post outed him as their confirming source and published apologies from Davis. … The original CNN story — broadcast during Chris Cuomo’s prime-time show and written by Jim Sciutto, Marshall Cohen, and Watergate reporting legend Carl Bernstein — said that Davis had “declined to comment.” His involvement in the story, on so-called “background,” has not been previously reported.
A question LU raised in connection with another story — When’s the last time Lanny Davis practiced law? — can now be answered: Not recently enough.
Incidentally, in an interview on Sunday with Carl Bernstein, one of the authors of the bogus story, CNN’s Brian Stelter ignored entirely the fact that the story has since been debunked.
