The days-long controversy over President Trump’s phone call to a soldier’s widow continued Friday, as White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it would be “highly inappropriate” for reporters to question a false claim Chief of Staff John Kelly made about a member of Congress — because he’s a “four-star Marine general.”
Sarah Sanders: It’s “highly inappropriate” to question John Kelly — because he’s a general
Kelly made a false claim about a member of Congress, but Sanders says it’s “inappropriate” to debate that.
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
“If you wanna go after General Kelly, that’s up to you, but I think that — if you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that that’s something highly inappropriate,” Sanders said when asked about the matter.
The context is that on Thursday, Kelly attempted to discredit Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL), who has publicly criticized President Trump for insensitivity on the phone call with the soldier’s widow. (Wilson, who heard the call on speakerphone, claimed Trump said the soldier “knew what he signed up for.”)
So in an attempt to portray Wilson as a dishonest blowhard, Kelly claimed that in a 2015 speech about the dedication of an FBI building, Wilson bragged about how she “got the money” for the building. Kelly said he was “stunned” by this because Wilson wasn’t even in Congress when its funding was secured.
But Kelly was flat wrong on the facts. The Sun Sentinel’s Larry Barszewski reviewed video of Wilson’s speech, and found that she didn’t mention anything about getting funding for the building.
Without any way to actually back up Kelly’s incorrect claim, Sanders is relying on the absurd justification that he shouldn’t be questioned because he’s a “four-star general.” (He is retired.) Just another day at the Trump White House press briefing.
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