There was no way MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace was letting President Donald Trump get away with his flimsy explanation for his mind-boggling performance in Helsinki Monday.

“The president engaged in feeble cleanup this afternoon,” she began in a segment Tuesday, playing a clip of President Trump saying that he meant to say that he sees no reason that it “wouldn’t” be Russia who meddled in the 2016 elections.

“You know how you know that’s a lie?” Wallace asked. “You know how long it takes when you’re president to get a clip of your press conference? About 60 seconds.”

“We just learned though that stunning attempt at cleanup, most of it read from prepared remarks, followed an unscheduled meeting this morning of Trump’s top national security advisers concerning Russia and all the fallout from Helsinki,” she continued.

Wallace then introduced her panel for the segment and turned to one of her guests, the AP’s Jonathan Lemire, and said: “It’s a flagrant lie and a shameless lie to say he had to pull a transcript to find out what he’d said. The headlines were instant. The reaction was instant. He couldn’t have even been in the motorcade before his entire White House staff would have gone to him and said ‘Hey, that landed with a thud, you siding with Vladimir Putin over Dan Coats and the intelligence community.’ So what gives with the web of lies that he tried to weave in that prepared remark today?”

“That excuse defies all believability, because even if he did misspeak in that one sentence, to take that as fact means you had to ignore the rest of the press conference,” Lemire replied.

“I worked on the White House staff for a president that sometimes actually misspoke, never to side with Vladimir Putin, but he did misspeak,” Wallace said. (Said president – as you may have guessed – was George W. Bush.) “You tell them the minute they walk off the set. And someone like Donald Trump, a showman to his core, would have walked back to the podium and cleaned it up if he actually regretted what he said.”

Watch above, via MSNBC.

[image via screengrab]

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