June 15, 2020

Donald Trump Has Always Been Such a Liar That His Lawyers Once Came Up With a Special System to Deal With It

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This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on October 12, 2016.

If Donald Trump has the “world’s greatest memory,” as he claimed in November 2015, he certainly hasn’t shown it off to his lawyers.

In fact, one of those lawyers, New Jersey casino specialist Patrick McGahn, once described how he and Trump’s fellow counsels always met with Trump in pairs because of Donald’s propensity for lying. “We tried to do it with Donald always if we could, because Donald says certain things and then has a lack of memory,” McGahn said in a deposition during the bankruptcy proceedings for the Trump Plaza casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

McGahn said he typically did this with all public figures, but he singled out Trump for his particularly casual relationship with the truth. “Hey, Trump is a leader in the field,” McGahn said. “He’s an expert at interpreting things, let’s put it that way.”

“That’s interestingly put,” his questioner noted.

Trump apparently has recurring memory problems when he meets with lawyers. He told NBC News last November that he had the “world’s greatest memory,” during a controversy surrounding his false claim to have seen thousands of Muslims celebrating the 9/11 attacks in New Jersey. But just three weeks later, he told a lawyer deposing him for one of the Trump University fraud lawsuits that he couldn’t even remember his own comment. “I don’t know that I said it,” Trump said.

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