A New Sam Nunberg Pretends No One Saw His National TV Meltdown

Former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg appears to be a changed man. It’s funny how six hours of being grilled during grand jury testimony will do that to a person.

Nunberg, who launched a lunatic national TV news blitz on Monday in which at least one news anchor accused him of being drunk, is now proclaiming that it’s his “duty as an American” to collaborate with a grand jury investigating the Trump administration’s possible collusion with Russia and other high crimes.

Nunberg appeared on two different cable news networks on Monday—on the phone and in person and on several different shows—after he was subpoenaed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team and ordered to testify before a grand jury. In those interviews, the former Trump campaign aide vowed to ignore the subpoena, which demanded copies of email communications he had with Trump insiders, and he said he’d refuse to testify.

The stunt was so insane that CNN’s Chris Cillizza filed a story about it called, “The 42 craziest quotes from Sam Nunberg’s absolutely bonkers CNN interviews.”

“I’m gonna be the first one in history to say, ‘I’m not going,’” he had said, along with, “I think it would be really, really funny if they wanted to arrest me because I don’t want to spend 80 hours going over emails I had with Steve Bannon and Roger Stone.”

But someone clearly must have had a long talk with him during the week, because Nunberg ended up spending more than six hours testifying before the grand jury on Friday. Hours later, he sat down with ABC News reporter Tara Palmeri and made more eyebrow–raising statements, including the claim that he never worked with “anybody that was unethical” while on Team Trump.

(Reminder: Mueller has brought more than 100 criminal charges against 19 people since his special counsel investigation began in May 2017.)

Nunberg also claimed that he had outsmarted the entire nation because Monday’s meltdown supposedly was all an act (emphasis mine): “People say I had a meltdown on TV—I melted TV down that day. I wanted to show what this independent counsel, this independent investigation does to people like me.”

As a refresher, here’s a sample of Nunberg’s performance on Monday:

In the interview aired Saturday morning, Nunberg claimed, “I was going to always comply with arriving today. I’m an attorney. That’s the first thing. And this is my duty as an American to do this, whether I like it or not.”

Nunberg also reversed his previous claim that Mueller’s investigation is a “witch hunt,” a statement that President Trump often likes to repeat. “The president’s right, it’s a witch hunt,” he had said last Monday. In this weekend’s ABC interview, Nunberg said: “No, I don’t think it’s a witch hunt…There’s a lot of ‘there’ there. And that’s a sad truth. And I don’t believe it leads to the president.” Of course not.

Several reports have noted that Nunberg likely isn’t done testifying. Let’s hope he at least gets his story straight while under oath.