FLASHBACK: Sarah Huckabee Sanders Tells Reporter It Is ‘Highly Inappropriate’ to Contradict John Kelly
President Donald Trump unloaded on John Kelly Thursday after his former White House chief of staff spoke against him in a recent speech.
“When I terminated John Kelly, which I couldn’t do fast enough, he knew full well that he was way over his head,” Trump fumed on Twitter. He continued the attack by invoking Kelly’s wife, Karen, and claiming she “once pulled me aside & said strongly that ‘John respects you greatly. When we are no longer here, he will only speak well of you.'”
….which he actually has a military and legal obligation to do. His incredible wife, Karen, who I have a lot of respect for, once pulled me aside & said strongly that “John respects you greatly. When we are no longer here, he will only speak well of you.” Wrong!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 13, 2020
Put aside Trump’s demand for silence and the fact that Kelly was his chief of staff for 18 months. What’s most interesting here is that the president is okay with attacking Kelly now, when his administration used to deem it reprehensible to call the four-star Marine general into question.
Consider how Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Kelly in one of the rowdiest briefings she ever had as White House press secretary.
Back in 2017, Kelly was under intense criticism when he leveled a false accusation at Congresswoman Frederica Wilson (D-FL) in response to her criticism of the president. The controversy revolved around a phone call Trump made to a family of Wilson’s constituents: the Gold Star family of a soldier who died in an ambush in Niger.
Wilson and the soldier’s family claimed that Trump was insensitive throughout that call, and in response, Kelly accused Wilson of political grandstanding. Kelly also accused Wilson of giving a speech in 2015 to take credit for obtaining the construction funds for a new FBI building.
Video from Wilson’s speech directly contradicted Kelly’s core claims at the time, but Sanders defended Kelly at a press briefing in which she faced an avalanche of questions on the matter. Sanders claimed Kelly was referring to comments Wilson made off-camera, and she eventually snapped at a reporter who said Kelly was “wrong.”
“If you want to go after General Kelly, that’s up to you,” she said. “If you want to get into a debate with the four-star Marine general, I think that’s something highly inappropriate. Go ahead.”
Keep an eye on Fox to see if she maintains that viewpoint now that Trump is attacking that same four-star general.
Watch above, via CNN.
