CNN host to Manafort: ‘You keep lying about it’

“I’m not lying about anything,” said Manafort. “I’m not lying about anything.”

Melania Trump’s speech Monday evening at the Republican National Convention featured passages that appear to have been lifted directly from an address First Lady Michelle Obama delivered in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Trump’s speech writers claim they didn’t insert the familiar language, and the billionaire’s campaign has so far given a mixed-message response to the issue.

Manafort, for example, insisted Wednesday that the story was “not meaningful at all,” and encouraged Cuomo and others to “move on.”

“She’s not a candidate for office,” he said. “She was expressing her personal feelings about her country and her husband and why he’s best for the United States. And I agree with you, that’s the final word.”

Cuomo responded, “Except, Paul, all of that can be true, except that you are denying by failing to acknowledge something that’s also true, which is that some of those words came from Michelle Obama’s speech in 2008. You have every kind of expert and anybody with eyes who sees that. You keep ignoring it. I don’t understand why. I don’t understand why you keep making this an issue.”

Manafort said again that it was a non-story, and encouraged the press to focus on the bigger issues at hand.

“I understand all of that,” said Cuomo. “The reason that this matters, though, is that, frankly, you’re distracting from that storyline by refusing to acknowledge something that’s true, and it plays into two issues.”

“The first is, a big part of the case I’m hearing here at the convention for why Donald Trump needs to be president is that Hillary Clinton can’t be trusted, that she doesn’t level with the American people, which is another way of saying she lies. That is what this is going on right now with this issue that should be small about this speech,” he added.

The CNN anchor then launched into a mini-monologue:

You don’t like that you got caught with some of Michelle Obama’s language in the speech. Who knows how it happened. You had a big group working with Melania and don’t want to acknowledge it because that’s the way this campaign works.

That plays into the second problem, which is that when faced with something that you did wrong, you just deny it, no matter whether it’s true or not. Whether it’s the man who has a developmental disability who works for ‘The New York Times,’ and Donald Trump mocks him and then says, no, I didn’t. Whether it’s a star that represents the Star of David and you say, no, it’s a sheriff’s star.

There is a pattern, whether it’s Baron, John Miller, that was really Donald Trump. There’s a pattern of denying the obvious. What happens when you’re running the government of the United States and you don’t want to deal with what happens then. That’s the concern. That’s why I don’t understand you won’t just own this little thing and move on.

From there, Manafort and Cuomo argued back-and-forth over whether the speech was plagiarized, and whether the Trump campaign should own up to it.

The host stressed that the story is important because it reveals a troubling pattern on dishonesty surrounding the Trump campaign, while Trump’s campaign manager said repeatedly that it is time to “move on.”

Shortly after the interview concluded Wednesday, Trump himself commented on the issue, and declared on social media that her speech was a huge success.

“Good news is Melania’s speech got more publicity than any in the history of politics especially if you believe that all press is good press!” he tweeted.