Hopes Dim for DACA Deal as Lawmakers Battle Over Trump’s Immigration Remarks
The Homeland Security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, who also attended the meeting, said on “Fox News Sunday”
that she did not recall the president “saying that exact phrase.”
Mr. Durbin had told reporters on Friday that Mr. Trump called African nations “shitholes,” which Mr. Durbin said was “the exact word used by the president, not just once,
but repeatedly.” He called the president’s comments “hate-filled, vile and racist.” At the meeting, Mr. Durbin said Mr. Trump also questioned whether the United States needed more Haitians.
“I didn’t hear that word either,” Mr. Cotton said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“And I was sitting no further away from Donald Trump than Dick Durbin was.”
Mr. Cotton said Mr. Durbin “has a history of misrepresenting what happens in White House meetings,” an assertion
that Mr. Perdue made in his own interview Sunday morning on ABC’s “This Week.”
Ben Marter, a spokesman for Mr. Durbin, responded by suggesting that Mr. Perdue and Mr. Cotton should not be believed.
Mr. Perdue and another Republican senator at the meeting, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, had previously said they did “not recall the president saying these comments specifically.”
But by Sunday, their recollections appeared to have sharpened, and Mr. Cotton joined Mr. Perdue in disputing Mr. Durbin’s account.
The senator, David Perdue of Georgia, also accused another participant in the White House meeting, Senator Richard
J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, of a “gross misrepresentation” of what the president had said at the session.
