Posted a bit after 1 PM EDT, it is titled New bombshell: Trump committed perjury or lied about trying to bribe Jeb — ‘there’s no third option’ and I am linking to the complete story posted with permission as it appears at Raw Story.
The first paragraph sets it out starkly:
Donald Trump committed perjury. Or he looked into the faces of the Republican faithful and knowingly lied. There is no third option.
The third and fourth provide a more complete context:
This time, it is different. Trump can’t skip past his perfidy here. There are two records—one, a previously undisclosed deposition of the Republican nominee testifying under oath, and the second a transcript/video of a Republican presidential debate. In them, Trump tells contradictory versions of the same story with the clashing accounts tailored to provide what he wanted people to believe when he was speaking.
This fib matters far more than whether Trump was honest about why he abandoned his birther movement or the corollary fib that Hillary Clinton started the racist story that President Obama was born in Kenya. In the lie we are examining here, Trump either committed a felony or proved himself willing to deceive his followers whenever it suits him.
The particular issue is whether or not he attempted to influence Jeb Bush in order to gain a casino license in Florida. You may remember this coming up in an early Republican debate. What makes this a new story with the implication asserted by Eichenwald is the previously unknown transcript of Trump’s sworn testimony in a lawsuit:
The deposition was part of a lawsuit he’d filed against Richard Fields, who Trump had hired to manage the expansion of his casino business into Florida. In the suit, Trump claimed that Fields had quit and taken all of the information he obtained while working for Trump to another company. Under oath, Trump said he did want to get into casino gambling in Florida but didn’t because he had been cheated by Fields.
Eichenwald provides transcripts both of the exchange between Bush and Trump in the debate, and of the Q & A of the deposition, then writes:
One of these stories is a lie—a detailed, self-serving fabrication. But unlike the mountain of other lies he has told, this time the character trait that leads to Trump’s mendacity is on full display: He makes things up when he doesn’t want to admit he lost.
OUCH!
Eichenwald has a lot more to say, very much on point, about this.
Expect, as we saw after Eichenwald’s piece on Trump’s business dealings, this to lead to multiple appearances on TV by Eichenwald discussing this piece, which puts it into the public arena, and which may even lead to a question or comment at the debate, if not by Lester Holt, perhaps given the right opening, by Hillary Clinton.
Eichenwald also reminds us of more of this pattern by Trump, taking us back to the dispute over what was said in private in Trump’s meeting with Mexico’s President, before concluding with these words:
Trump must be called upon to answer the troubling questions raised by the episode regarding Bush and gambling in Florida: Is the Republican nominee a perjurer or just a liar? If he refuses to answer—just as he has refused to address almost every other question about his character and background—Trump supporters must carefully consider whether they want to vote for a man who at best has treated them like fools over the past year, and who at worst, committed a crime