Trump is a pathological liar.
A decade ago, my lawyers questioned Trump under oath during a deposition in a libel case he filed against me for a biography I wrote, “TrumpNation.” (Trump lost the case in 2011.) Trump had to acknowledge 30 times during that deposition that he had lied over the years about a wide range of issues: his ownership stake in a large Manhattan real estate development; the cost of a membership to one of his golf clubs; the size of the Trump Organization; his wealth; the rate for his speaking appearances; how many condos he had sold; the debt he owed, and whether he borrowed money from his family to stave off personal bankruptcy.
Trump also lied during the deposition about his business relationships with organized crime figures.
Timothy L. O'Brien @ Bloomberg
Bingo.
When Trump entered the Atlantic City casino market in the late 1970s, two of his partners were men he knew to have organized crime ties: Kenneth Shapiro, who was a bag man for the Philadelphia mob, and Daniel Sullivan, who was a Mafia associate and a labor negotiator.
[...]
"They were tough guys," Trump told me. "In fact, they say that Dan Sullivan was the guy that killed Jimmy Hoffa." Sullivan "probably wasn't an honest guy," Trump added, and Shapiro "was like a third-rate, local real estate Mafia."
Trump’s propensity for lying was also on display throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. He said that he had opposed the Iraq War when he hadn’t; he lied about his stances on climate change and the national debt; he lied about various insults he had hurled at women; he lied about who had endorsed him; he lied about how much money his father had given him over the years, and on, and on.
[...]
Trump’s own lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, has had problems getting his facts straight, too. (Kasowitz represented Trump when the president sued me in 2006.) In a press release littered with errors and a misspelled title for Trump (“Predisent”), Kasowitz accused Comey last week of trying to undermine the White House by leaking information about his conversations with the president.
Kasowitz also said that Comey lied when testifying that he shared information about his conversations with the president only after Trump tweeted that he might have made tapes of the same conversations. Yet, Kasowitz claimed, the New York Times had published an article about the Comey-Trump conversations prior to Trump’s tweet. Kasowitz was wrong, however. The Times' first article about the conversations appeared on May 16, four days after Trump tweeted.
[...]
Trump revived speculation about hidden White House tapes again on Friday, suggesting in the Rose Garden that he will advise the world about whether they exist in the “very near future.”
As I noted last month, I don’t think any tapes exist. Trump told me and other reporters over the years that he had a taping system in his Trump Tower office that he used to record journalists meeting with him. But when he testified under oath in the deposition for his suit against me, Trump acknowledged that he was “not equipped to tape-record.”
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The difference now, of course, is that Trump is president. And in James Comey he’s collided with a seasoned, wily law enforcement official who opened the investigative door for Robert Mueller and cleared a path for him to bring the full force of the law to bear on the White House.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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