David Bossie and Corey Lewandowski, key advisers to President Trump, said in a joint interview that they witnessed no instances of collusion with Russian entities or operatives during their time serving on his 2016 campaign.
Neither Republican operative served from beginning to end, with Lewandowski exiting his role as campaign manager at the beginning of the general election and Bossie coming on as deputy campaign manager for the final fall push. But the two loyalists, who still speak with Trump regularly, said evidence of campaign officials colluding with Moscow would have leaked if it existed.
“The answer is: How the hell would we know if we didn’t know? But if it happened — which it did not, in my opinion, I think in Corey’s opinion as well — it would have come out by now,” Bossie said during a wide-ranging interview with the Washington Examiner podcast, “Behind Closed Doors,” when asked if it was possible that campaign officials other than Trump might have engaged in activities that amounted to collusion.
“The way we’ve seen this investigation run, the leaks that are pervasive, the deep state that continues to leak out information,” Bossie continued. “We would have some piece of evidence — somebody triggered as, hey, person X had a meeting with person Y and now we have to get answers to that. Or there are emails or there are communications of some sort. There’s nothing. The Russian collusion investigation is now over. It has clearly morphed into something else. What that is, no one has any idea.”
Robert Mueller, a former FBI director, was appointed last year to lead the federal investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential contest and allegations that the president and his campaign colluded with Moscow to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Trump appointee, tapped Mueller after the president fired then-FBI Director James Comey.
The probe recently has examined whether Russia’s meddling in the 2016 contest was channeled through Cambridge Analytica, a Republican-aligned data analytics firm that worked with the Trump campaign to influence voter turnout. Lewandowski took umbrage with that suggestion, saying the Trump team, with an assist from major social media platforms, did exactly what former President Barack Obama’s campaign did in the 2008 contest, only better.
“We, the Trump campaign, use publicly available data. We have the titans from Silicon Valley, who offered the same support to Hillary Clinton who said, ‘no I’m too smart for this,’ come — Facebook and Instagram and all those guys — come to our office and help us identify people,” Lewandowski said. “All of a sudden, we don’t get the credit Barack Obama gets; we are being, at least, accused, of having the Russians win the election, as opposed to the work that we actually did, and that is the most frustrating part.”
“Barack Obama’s team were geniuses because of what they did, we do exactly the same thing, only more sophisticated, and we beat the Clinton cabal and we didn’t do it on our own, it was the Russians that did it,” Lewandowski added.
