White House chief of staff John Kelly said he would “absolutely not” apologize to Rep. Frederica Wilson for leveling false attacks against her while he defended President Trump’s botched condolence call to a Gold Star widow.
The Democratic congresswoman has complained that the retired Marine general mischaracterized remarks she made at a 2015 dedication of an FBI field office named after two slain FBI agents.
Asked by Fox News host Laura Ingraham if he had anything to apologize for, Kelly said: “Oh, no. No. Never. Well, I’ll apologize if I need to. But for something like that, absolutely not. I stand by my comments.”
While denouncing Wilson for criticizing Trump’s call — in which he reportedly told Myeisha Johnson that her husband, Army Sgt. La David Johnson, “knew what he signed up for” – Kelly charged that she crudely boasted about securing federal funding for the building.
During a press briefing, he referred to her “an empty barrel,” suggesting she was a person who made a lot of noise but had nothing important to say.
But video of Wilson’s dedication speech appeared to contradict Kelly’s claim that she had bragged about funding.
Kelly vaguely suggested that he may have been accusing Wilson of grandstanding during a private discussion and not in her public speech.
“I’ll go back and talk about before her comments and at the reception afterwards,” Kelly said. “Again, it was a package deal. Don’t want to get into it.”
He added that the pregnant widow “has every right to say what she wants to say. But it’s the politicization of something that was so from the heart.”
Wilson’s account of the controversial call was later corroborated by Johnson herself, who said the president’s words exacerbated her grief when he did not remember La David’s name.
Kelly – who lost his own son in Afghanistan — defended what Trump said to Johnson, whose husband died along with three other Green Berets in an Oct. 4 ambush in Niger.
“He did the best he could to make it personal,” he said. “And the best he could to make them understand how sorry he was as the president and as a father himself. And then to see what came of that just was stunning to me.”