CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Gives Karoline Leavitt Props for Standing Up for Her When the Saudis Tried to Ban Her From Press Event

CNN host Kaitlan Collins gave props to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday, recalling the time Leavitt stood up for her when Saudi Arabia’s Royal Guard tried to ban her from attending a press event.

During an appearance on Heather McMahan’s Absolutely Not podcast, Collins recalled:

We were in Saudi Arabia and we were on a foreign trip with the president and he came in with all the other leaders, including the Saudi crown prince. They famously do not like the media there, to put it lightly, and I asked a shouted question to President Trump, who had seen me when the U.S. press came in. He didn’t answer, which is how it works – you shout questions, they either answer or they don’t, it’s their prerogative – and then the world leaders left the room. The Saudi Royal Guard kind of freaked out because I had dared to ask a question and they’re not used to that there because they don’t have a free press, and so they came up and they said, “Okay, well you can’t come into the next event,” which was like two minutes later, and I was like, “That’s not how this works, I belong to the U.S. press,” and they were like, “Well, you’re not coming in.” And I could see them like whispering and pointing about me and some of the younger White House staff that are with the press weren’t really sure what to do and they went to Karoline, and to her credit she said, “No, Kaitlan’s coming in with the rest of the U.S. press,” and we went in, and so it didn’t become this big issue.

The CNN host concluded, “So to her credit, she without a doubt was like, ‘No, you’re coming in,’ which I do think is important in that moment, especially when you’re kind of the U.S. contingent abroad and we don’t do things like they do in Saudi Arabia.”

Collins made her comments just a day after she laid into Leavitt on CNN’s The Source for complaining about coverage of U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick’s 2012 lunch with the late serial sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on his infamous island.

Lutnick visited Epstein’s “pedophile island” with his wife and two children, years after Epstein had already been convicted for procurement of a child for prostitution.

Watch above via the Absolutely Not podcast.

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