White House Briefing Boils Over as McEnany Flees Podium, Throws Parting Shot at CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: ‘I Don’t Take Questions From Activists’
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany held her first press briefing since Oct. 1 and, much like the Coronavirus Task Force briefing from the day before, it ended with an explosion of frustration and outrage from assembled members of the press.
After taking a final question from the impossibly White House-friendly OAN reporter Chanel Rion, McEnany finished the briefing by making specious claims that compared the current lack of peaceful transition to the Biden administration, with an aggrieved and mostly fictionalized description of the transition that then President-elect Donald Trump received from former President Barack Obama. This, despite the fact that Trump formally thanked his predecessor for an orderly transition in his inaugural address.
Nonetheless, McEnany signaled for the first time publicly what was really behind Trump’s petulant and baseless claims of a “rigged” or “stolen” election: it’s payback for what the White House feels was unfair investigations into Russian election interference.
“In January of that year, you have President Obama having a buy the book a meeting where they talked about the Logan Act using it to go after lieutenant general Michael Flynn just before the inauguration,” the press secretary noted, ignoring the detail that Flynn since pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
The press secretary also cited Buzzfeed’s publishing of the Steele Dossier, then she mentioned, “the baseless Mueller investigation which found no evidence that exonerated President Trump and about 2016.” She is wrong on the claim that the Mueller investigation was baseless and found no evidence or exonerated Trump, which is best illustrated by the bipartisan and GOP-led findings from the Senate Intelligence Committee.
As McEnany left the podium, reporters shouted answers with anger and frustration for such a short briefing. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins tried to get in a question, which McEnany dismissed by saying, “I don’t take questions from activists.” As other reporters shouted out, McEnany and her assistants left the briefing room.
Collins called after McEnany after she fled the podium.
“I’m not an activist, and you haven’t taken questions since October 1st,” Collins said. “And you just took about five, Kayleigh, that’s not doing your job. Your taxpayer-funded job.”
Afterward, Collins addressed the moment on Twitter:
With the sitting president not conceding defeat to an election he clearly lost more than two weeks later, it is certainly outrageous that the White House communications team is playing so hard to get.
Watch above via Fox News.
