Sarah Sanders Fires Back at Pelosi Over Leaked Flight Charge: ‘Outrageous’ She’d Claim Trump Would Put Lives in ‘Jeopardy’

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders fired back at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in front of a press gaggle Friday, over an accusation that the Trump administration tried to sabotage Pelosi’s scheduled commercial flight to Afghanistan.

“Unbecoming of the speaker to make that type of accusation,” said Sanders, per Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg News. “Outrageous that she would accuse the president of the United States of putting any life in jeopardy.”

President Donald Trump had written a letter delaying Pelosi’s scheduled trip to Brussels and Afghanistan after she’d written a letter delaying his scheduled State of the Union address before Congress. Per the Washington Post‘s Philip Rucker, a White House official voiced the concern that if Pelosi does end up taking her planned trip to Afghanistan along with 20 lawmakers, the world now knows about it and they would no longer be able to travel safely.

Sanders told reporters the President’s intention for keeping the Speaker and other lawmakers in the country over the weekend is to make sure progress is made on the government shutdown front, so that government workers can receive their paychecks as swiftly as possible.

“That’s one of the key reasons that the President did not want Speaker Pelosi to leave the country, is because if she did it would all but guarantee the fact that the negotiations couldn’t take place over the weekend, and federal workers, 800,000 federal workers, wouldn’t receive their paychecks, because she wasn’t here to help make a deal,” said Sanders.