During a press briefing on Wednesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders addressed claims by President Trump that he received calls from the president of Mexico and the leader of Boy Scouts.
The White House is denying that President Trump "had lied" about two complimentary calls he said he had received--one from Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto and the other from the Boy Scouts.
Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked about the calls during a press briefing Wednesday, and she said, “On Mexico, he was referencing a conversation that they had at the G20 summit where they specifically talked about the issues that he referenced. In terms of the Boy Scouts, multiple members of the Boy Scout leadership--following his speech there that day--congratulated him, praised him, and offered...powerful compliments following his speech, and those were what those references were about.”
After a reporter pressed Sanders on Trump’s comments about the phone call with Mexico, she clarified that “they were direct conversations, not actual phone calls.”
And when the reporter asked if Trump lied, Sanders said, “I wouldn’t say it was a lie. That’s [a] pretty bold accusation…The conversations took place. They just simply didn’t take place over a phone call...He had them in person.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, the president referenced the call from Peña Nieto on Monday, saying, “...even the president of Mexico called me—they said their southern border, very few people are coming because they know they’re not going to get through our border, which is the ultimate compliment.”
The comment had been made to praise the work of his new chief of staff John Kelly who had previously been Homeland Security secretary.
However, the Mexican Foreign Relations Ministry issued a statement saying, Peña Nieto “has not recently spoken to President Donald Trump over the telephone.”
Meanwhile, Trump reportedly told the Journal in a July 25 interview, “I got a call from the head of the Boy Scouts saying it was the greatest speech that was ever made to them, and they were very thankful.”
But the organization has since said, “We are unaware of any such call.”
In fact, according to a Los Angeles Times report, one of the leaders, Chief Scout Executive Mike Surbaugh, “apologized last week to members of the scouting community who were offended by the political rhetoric in Trump's July 24 speech in West Virginia.”
