The following article by Philip Bump was psoted on the Washingt Post website December 12, 2017:
Three of the women accusing President Trump of sexual misconduct speak out again, in hopes a new “environment” will yield change. (Joyce Koh/The Washington Post)
This article has been updated.
President Trump is frustrated. He sees the 2016 election as having vindicated him on any number of things: his often-acidic politics, his disparagement of traditional campaign tactics, his rejection of the media’s correctives, his decision not to release his tax returns.
In the same vein as that last item, he sees it as having rendered unimportant the allegations that arose about his misconduct with women. He denied the stories outright and without nuance, and only he and the women know what actually happened. But he clearly believes that, now that he’s president, the subject should be tabled indefinitely.
The White House said as much in a statement on Monday. The accusations were “addressed at length” during the campaign, and “the American people voiced their judgment by delivering a decisive victory.” The decisiveness of that victory aside, that’s the argument, one that press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders reiterated during the afternoon press briefing.
The president says he’s “very happy” sexual misconduct by powerful men is being “exposed.” He denies all of the allegations against him. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)
The statement also included a dramatic bit of exculpation. The claims of Trump’s accusers were “false” and “totally disputed in most cases by eyewitness accounts.” The falsity had been asserted by the White House before, but this claim that the accusations had been disputed by eyewitness accounts was new.
Sanders was asked about that claim, too.
“In terms of the specific eyewitness accounts,” she said on Monday afternoon, “there have been multiple reports, and I’d be happy to provide them to you after the briefing has completed.”
In the interests of ensuring that the president is exonerated in the face of debunked accusations, we below have listed the women who’ve accused Trump of inappropriate conduct (as compiled by The Post’s Meg Kelly) and all of the eyewitnesses who’ve been presented by the White House to prove their stories wrong.
Kristin Anderson. Claims Trump touched her clothed genitals at a nightclub. Two people corroborated having heard the story.
Eyewitness rebuttal: None presented by the White House.
Speaking to Washington Post reporter Karen Tumulty via a telephone earpiece, Kristin Anderson recalls Donald Trump groping her. (Alice Li, Brian Young/The Washington Post)
Rachel Crooks. Claims Trump kissed her on the mouth against her will. Two people corroborated having heard the story.
Eyewitness rebuttal: None presented by the White House.
Jessica Drake. Claims Trump kissed her against her will.
Eyewitness rebuttal: None presented by the White House.
Jill Harth. Claims Trump aggressively groped her. One person corroborated having heard the story.
Eyewitness rebuttal: None presented by the White House.
Cathy Heller. Claims Trump kissed her on the mouth against her will. Two people corroborated having heard the story.
Eyewitness rebuttal: None presented by the White House.
Ninni Laaksonen. Claims Trump groped her.
Eyewitness rebuttal: None presented by the White House.
Jessica Leeds. Claims Trump groped her on an airplane. One person corroborated having heard the story.
Eyewitness rebuttal: When the story came out — one of the first that did — a man who claimed to have been on the flight alleged that Leeds was the aggressor. The man making that claim, Anthony Gilberthorpe, has a history of making unproven claims, including that he had once regularly provided underage boys to members of Britain’s Parliament for sex parties.
After Harvey Weinstein’s fall, Trump accusers wonder why not him too. (Video: Alice Li/Photo: Celeste Sloman/The Washington Post)
Mindy McGillivray. Claims Trump groped her. One person corroborated having heard the story.
Eyewitness rebuttal: None presented by the White House.
Jennifer Murphy. Claims Trump kissed her against her will.
Eyewitness rebuttal: None presented by the White House.
Natasha Stoynoff. Claims Trump forcibly kissed her at Mar-a-Lago. Five people corroborated hearing about the story at the time.
Eyewitness rebuttal: None presented by the White House, but a longtime family butler who came into the room after the incident said that nothing seemed unusual.
Temple Taggart McDowell. Claims Trump kissed her against her will.
Eyewitness rebuttal: None presented by the White House.
Karena Virginia. Claims Trump groped her.
Eyewitness rebuttal: None presented by the White House.
Summer Zervos. Claims Trump aggressively kissed and groped her. One person corroborated having heard the story.
Eyewitness rebuttal: None presented by the White House.
We will, of course, update this list with further eyewitness rebuttals should they be revealed. Unless, of course, there are not actually eyewitnesses that can rebut these stories. Instead, the White House has repeatedly insisted that there were solely to try to reject the allegations out-of-hand in hopes they’d eventually go away.
Update: The White House sent a list of eyewitness rebuttals to ThinkProgress. It included:
- The rebuttal to Leeds that had already been made public, as above.
- Two former contestants denying that Trump used to walk backstage at the Miss Teen USA pageant as contestants were changing. Since it didn’t involve physical contact, that allegation was not included above.
That’s the extent of what was provided.
Trump complained about the reemergence of the stories on Twitter Tuesday morning, suggesting that it had happened because the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had failed to take him down.
Despite thousands of hours wasted and many millions of dollars spent, the Democrats have been unable to show any collusion with Russia – so now they are moving on to the false accusations and fabricated stories of women who I don’t know and/or have never met. FAKE NEWS!
That tweet came less than an hour after PolitiFact announcedits “Lie of the Year”: Trump’s repeated claim that the focus of Mueller’s investigation — Russian meddling in the 2016 election — was a “made-up story.”
View the post here.