The campaign aide who shared the Access Hollywood tape with Donald Trump says the video of the president demeaning women that made the rounds last year ‘is of course real.’
Trump’s deputy campaign manager at the time, David Bossie, confirmed Monday that it is the sitting president in the hot mic recording from 2005 bragging that he’s entitled to grab women ‘by the p***y’ because he’s a star.
‘The president made a tape where he acknowledged having the locker room talk. And I think that that’s where it ends with him. It was all about the talk,’ Bossie said.
The campaign aide who shared the Access Hollywood tape with Donald Trump says the video of the president demeaning women that made the rounds last year ‘is of course real’
When the damning tape where Trump boasted that he ‘could do anything’ to women was unearthed in October of 2016, the Republican immediately apologized for his behavior.
‘This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago,’ a campaign statement said. ‘I apologize if anyone was offended.’
As the campaign went into damage control mode, Trump released a video of himself copping to it.
‘I said it. I was wrong, and I’m sorry,’ he said the following day.
Since the tape’s release, Trump has been accused of sexual harassment by 16 women, one of whom is currently suing him. Trump has consistently denied that he made lewd gestures toward them, in spite of his assertions in the Access Hollywood tape that he had engaged in similar conduct.
The New York Times said last week that Trump has raised doubts that it was his voice on the tape. He made the claim to a Republican senator in January, the publication reported, and had recently begun to revisit the topic again.
Trump’s spokeswoman said last week, in response to the report, that the president ‘made his position clear on that at the time’ and it ‘hasn’t changed.’
Billy Bush, the former Access Hollywood host, who was heard jousting with Trump in the recording that leaked during the general election, also said it was authentic on Sunday.
Bush wrote in a New York Times op-ed, ‘Of course he said it.’
‘And we laughed along, without a single doubt that this was hypothetical hot air from America’s highest-rated bloviator,’ Bush recalled.
The former NBC employee who was fired over the shocking banter says the report that Trump was dabbling in ‘revisionist history’ hit ‘a raw nerve.’
‘To these women: I will never know the fear you felt or the frustration of being summarily dismissed and called a liar, but I do know a lot about the anguish of being inexorably linked to Donald Trump,’ Bush said. ‘You have my respect and admiration. You are culture warriors at the forefront of necessary change.’
On Meet the Press on Sunday, the topic came up during an interview with Bossie, who wrote in a new book that he was among the top campaign aides who brought the Access Hollywood transcript to Trump’s attention, as the then-candidate was preparing for the second presidential debate.
‘I don’t even know why that’s of interest today. The president put out his apology video that weekend,’ he said.
Bossie confirmed to MTP host Chuck Todd that Trump is the braggart in the tape.
‘It’s clear that it is,’ he said.
Co-author Corey Lewandowksi, campaign manager to Trump through the primary, said the issue has already been litigated.
‘The American people had a month before election day when the Access Hollywood tape came out,’ he stated. ‘And the American people, 60 million people, stepped forward and said, “We want Donald Trump as our president.”‘
In a joint interview on Monday, also on NBC, Bossie told Today show host Savannah Guthrie: ‘We wouldn’t be talking about this today, I don’t think, if all these high profile folks in the last month hadn’t had a problem. And I think this is behind the president and we really want to move forward.’
Lewandowski said he’s had thousands of conversations with Trump over his lifetime.
‘I’ve never heard him say that,’ he said of the claim that Trump is circulating a false narrative. ‘So where these sources, where the fake news wants to report this, anonymous sources, inside what the president saying, what we’ve seen time and time again is people want to make up a story that isn’t true.’
In the book, however, Bossie and Lewandowski captured Trump’s first reaction to the tape, as the Washington Post handed over to then-campaign Press Secretary Hope Hicks a transcript, before sending the audio clip.
‘That doesn’t sound like something I would say,’ Trump reportedly said upon reading the transcript, as Bossie and Lewandowski noted that the candidate appeared, at first, to question the tape’s authenticity.
If there was any doubt from Trump after the airing of the audio clip, the authors didn’t say.