JIM SCIUTTO: Here is Donald Trump's new response on this via Twitter. As usual he says, “The plane I saw on television was the hostage plane in Geneva, Switzerland, not the plane carrying $400 million in cash going to Iran!” Now, just for sake of fact, let's play his actual comments yesterday, which was a repeated story in effect about what he saw on that video. Let's have a listen.
[BEGIN VIDEO]
DONALD TRUMP: A tape was made, right? You saw that with the airplane coming in? Nice plane. And the airplane coming in and the money coming off, I guess, right? That was given to us, has to be, by the Iranians. And you know why the tape was given to us? Because they want to embarrass our country. They want to embarrass our country.
[END VIDEO]
SCIUTTO: So two glaring misstatements of fact there. One, he did say in that statement yesterday in public that the plane had money coming off it, not hostages, as he says in the tweet. But he also says that this tape was somehow given to us by the Iranians. And again, now in the tweet he says not given to us by the Iranians, but something that he saw on television. So the question here, John and Poppy, is this tweet an admission of guilt in effect, or not guilt but inaccuracy, or is he in effect recreating the reality here, saying that “I was never talking about money coming off that plane, I was always talking about the hostages?” And it seems to me, looking at that tweet that what he's saying is that “well no, no, I wasn't talking about money, I was talking purely about hostages.” We'll leave that to the chattering classes and the rest of us to decide going forward.
