Trump adviser defends Trump calling Bill Clinton a 'victim' in the past

Forget what Donald Trump said in defense of Bill Clinton in the 1990s, Trump adviser and special counsel Michael Cohen insisted Tuesday.

"He was a private citizen who was friendly with the Clintons, and he was trying to protect a friend, all right. Now, it's a different game. It's 2016, he is the presidential, he's the Republican presidential nominee," Cohen said during a lengthy and contentious interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day."


Cuomo grilled Cohen on Trump's past statements defending Clinton in the face of allegations of sexual misconduct in the 1990s, pointing to what he said as two problems, one being that it makes the presumptive Republican nominee look like a hypocrite and "two, glass houses."

"He defended Bill Clinton for years. He said the same allegations that you guys are talking about now, were a waste of time, were wrong, were hollow, that Bill Clinton was a terrific guy, that he was a great president. That the impeachment was wrong, that it was a waste of time," Cuomo said.

Cohen fired back, noting that Hillary Clinton on several occasions had called Trump "one of the smartest businessmen in the United States" and is now attacking him with ads on his past statements calling into question his business acumen with respect to how it reflects upon his leadership.

All Trump is doing, Cohen said, "is giving the facts." Asked whether Trump was lying, then, when he said, for example, Clinton was a "victim" of "unattractive women" and that Linda Tripp, for example, was the "personification of evil," Cohen remarked that the campaign would not be talking about what Trump said in the 1990s because "it didn't matter."

"Why would I trust you if you say all the things you said then were false?" Cuomo asked, to which Cohen responded, "He was a private individual."

Cuomo followed up, "So you tell the truth when you're politician and lie when you're private individual?"

"He had no obligation to say anything to anybody," Cohen said. "He said plenty," Cuomo shot back.

Cohen replied, "So what? He is Donald Trump."

"But that's the record of what you believe," Cuomo remarked.

"No, no, no. It was — he was standing up for a man who he considered to be a friend at the time," Cohen said.

Asked whether Trump was saying things he knew were untrue at the time, Cohen said he did not, adding later that he did not think Trump knew the answer and was merely "standing up for a friend."

"He called Paula Jones, called Linda Tripp, the personification of evil," Cuomo said.

Cohen responded, "the person who called all of them the worst was Hillary Clinton, the great enabler."

Trump campaign co-chair and senior adviser Sam Clovis appeared on MSNBC later in the morning, defending his candidate's line of attack while remarking upon the network devoting the first block of its show to covering the preliminary hearing of Bill Cosby in a sexual assault case.

Pressed why Trump would go after issues that failed to stick to the Clintons in the 1990s, Clovis said it is a "different set of issues."

"And then we come to this issue here and we're essentially talking about the fact we have a war on women being waged by the Democrats, or at least against the Republicans. That's the accusation. And yet we have the person who is the lead of that fight on the part of the Democrats is in fact, the person who could not control the sexual predation that went on in her own home. So this is really an ironic aspect of this whole presentation here," Clovis said, going on to say, "I think this is really at the heart of this is that we have someone who is a lead person in this accusation of Republicans about the war on women and she couldn't control the war on women and the sexual predation that went on in her own home."