Fox News host Shepard Smith slammed President Trump and the White House on Monday for its shifting story on the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer and who wrote a later memo on the encounter, asserting that “somebody is lying to us.”
“It’s one of those days when you just don’t know what to do because we have two things put out as truth, and they’re opposites. And as a result of the fact they’re opposites, one of them is untrue,” Smith said following the White House’s daily press briefing.
{mosads}Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that Trump’s legal team told special counsel Robert Mueller in a letter that President Trump dictated Donald Trump Jr.’s response to a report about the 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders had said in August that Trump “certainly didn’t dictate” the memo, a comment that now directly contradicts Trump’s legal team.
Sanders refused to answer questions about the contradiction during a press briefing Monday, referring reporters to the president’s outside counsel.
“I’m not going to respond to a letter from the president’s outside counsel,” she said. “We’ve purposefully walled off, and I would refer you to them for comment.”
She offered no further explanation for the differences between the two versions.
“If one person says one thing, and another person says the opposite thing, someone’s not telling the truth … these inconsistencies seem to be among the most consistent things that we live with now,” Smith said.
Smith has been sharp in his criticism of Trump and his administration. Last week, he dismissed Trump’s “spygate” claims, saying that Fox News had no evidence to support the assertions.
“There’s nothing to support that claim and neither the president nor the White House has offered anything to support that claim,” Smith said.