Former Hillary Clinton campaign official Karen Finney clashed with former Donald Trump campaign official Bryan Lanza on CNN Thursday, over GOP attacks on the military service record of Vice President Kamala Harris' running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Finney debunked the Trump camp's claims that there were "discrepancies" in his account of what he did while in the Army National Guard.
This came amid coverage of Trump's bizarre press conference at Mar-a-Lago this afternoon, where he compared himself to Martin Luther King Jr., complained about how the media's treatment of him, and grudgingly reversed his decision to back out of presidential debates with Harris.
"I think it was important that the Harris campaign quickly called this a 'public meltdown,'" said anchor Wolf Blitzer. "Did Trump help himself today with this litany of falsehoods about polling the 2020 election, crowd sizes, and more?"
"I think he stepped into the conversation in a way that he actually felt he had to control over that," said Lanza.
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The biggest issue for Trump, he said, is that he "sort of stepped on ... the fact that Governor Tim Walz had to edit his biography, he sort of admitted that he lied on his biography for the past 20 years ... that's an embarrassment, 24 hours into this, you're dissecting the guy's military record and you're finding huge discrepancies that they have to change their biography."
"That's just simply not true," said Finney. "The man served honorably just 24 years and the comment that he made about carrying a weapon of war in war, he was deployed, he did not say he was in a combat zone. He did not say he was in active combat."
"My dad served in the United States Army," she continued. "So I take this very personally, the measure should not be about whether or not you thought you were in combat. The point is, did you put on the uniform of the United States of America? Tim Walz did for 24 years ... and let me just tell you, if this is the way they want to distract from the fact that Donald Trump used his wealth and his privilege to be able to actually skirt his responsibility to our country and not wear the uniform of our country, let's — fine, let's have that conversation. Let's ask more questions about why Donald Trump felt that he was too good to serve in the Armed Forces of the United States of America."
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