Kellyanne Conway Goes To New Lengths Defending Trump

WASHINGTON, DC — Kellyanne Conway went to extreme lengths Friday to defend President Trump from charges of collusion with Russia, decrying the fact we haven't yet seen extensive and damning evidence of a full-blown effort to coordinate the Kremlin-run effort to influence the 2016 election. Without that, she implied, the investigations into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia are likely a waste of taxpayer money.

"We were promised systemic, hard evidence of systemic, sustained, furtive collusion that not only interfered with our election process but indeed dictated the electoral outcome,” the counselor to the president said on the morning show "Fox & Friends." (For more information on this and other political stories, subscribe to the White House Patch to receive daily newsletters and breaking news alerts.)

It's not clear who, exactly, made this promise.

She also got in a dig at Trump's former election opponent: "One of the only people who says that seriously these days is still Hillary Clinton and nobody believes it. We know why she lost, it's obvious.”

Conway's comments follow a week of revelations that have deeply shaken the White House. A series of New York Times stories revealed a previously undisclosed meeting between a Russian lawyer, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager for Trump Paul Manafort. Despite nearly a year of denials that Russia was significantly involved in the 2016 election or had any ties to the Trump campaign, Trump Jr. ended up posting an email chain that showed he was explicitly offered opposition research from the Russian government.

And as recently as Friday morning, new revelations emerged suggesting additional Russian individuals may have attended the meeting that were previously unmentioned.

Many legal experts believe the meeting to discuss the research could have broken campaign finance laws, though there is disagreement on this matter. Conway, however, says the story does not live up to the hype.

However, the facts now confirmed by all sides show that many on the Trump team, including both Conway and the president himself, have misled the public about the campaign's connection to Russia.

“Again, the story that there was collusion between the Russians & Trump campaign was fabricated by Dems as an excuse for losing the election,” Trump tweeted in May.

In December of 2016, Conway herself unequivocally denied that the campaign had contact with Russia. John Dickerson of "Face the Nation" asked Conway, “Did anyone involved…in the Trump campaign have any contact with Russians trying to meddle in the election?”

“Absolutely not,” she said. “Those conversations never happened. I hear people saying it like it’s a fact on television. That is not only inaccurate and false, but it’s dangerous.”

Now, with evidence that such at least one such conversation did in fact occur, Conway believes investigating them may be frivolous.

"What kind of money are we going to spend by the taxpayers having these infinite investigations?" she asked Friday. "And there are many of them. If we’re going to do that, fine, I suppose.”

Watch the full clip of her "Fox & Friends" interview on the show below:

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images