Mick Mulvaney Appears To Confirm Donald Trump Conflicts, POTUS ‘Considers Himself In The Hospitality Business’
In a Thursday press conference that stunned legal experts and observers in the media, Mick Mulvaney — the acting chief of staff to Donald Trump — frankly admitted that Trump withheld badly needed military aid to Ukraine as part of a quid pro quo. The president held up the congressionally allocated aid in exchange for the Ukraine government “investigating” an unfounded conspiracy theory having to do with a supposed Democratic National Committee computer server that Trump believes is now in the hands of a wealthy Ukrainian.
Mulvaney, in the press conference, told critics of the illegal quid pro quo to “get over it,” as The Inquisitr reported.
Mulvaney later on Thursday issued a statement denying that he had admitted to the quid pro quo — despite the fact that his statements were broadcast live on multiple cable news stations — an assertion he repeated Sunday morning in a Fox News interview.
“That’s not what I said, that’s what people said I said,” Mulvaney told Fox News interviewer Chris Wallace, who then played a video recording of Mulvaney’s original statement, according to Raw Story.
“You totally said that,” Wallace replied, playing the recording. “You said what you said.”
In the Fox News interview, Mulvaney was also asked about Trump’s decision that his own National Doral resort would host the 2020 G7 world leaders summit meeting. It had been announced at the same Thursday press conference in which Mulvaney made his admission of a Ukraine quid pro quo.
Only on FOX News Sunday: Mick Mulvaney reacts to the president's decision to scrap the G7 summit at his Doral resort: "At the end of the day he (the President) still considers himself to be in the hospitality business." Exclusively on FOX News Sunday. Check your local listings. pic.twitter.com/vYfJCwPtJK
— Fox News Sunday (@FoxNewsSunday) October 20, 2019
Trump on Saturday announced that he was reversing his decision to hold the summit at his own resort, claiming that “the Hostile Media & their Democrat Partners” forced him to change his mind, as The Inquisitr reported. But legal experts and congressional Democrats had said that by awarding the lucrative federal contract to himself, Trump was exhibiting a clear financial conflict of interest, as well as violating the U.S. Constitution’s ban on federal officials taking payments from foreign governments.
In his tweets Saturday night announcing the reversal, Trump claimed that he would have made no money off hosting the event, and in fact, “thought I was doing something very good for our Country.” But in the Sunday interview, Mulvaney again appeared to make a perhaps inadvertently frank admission about Trump’s true motives.
“At the end of the day, he still considers himself to be in the hospitality business,” Mulvaney told Wallace, as quoted by NBC News, appearing to suggest that Trump approached the decision not as a public servant, but as the owner of a private hotel business.
