Members of White House press secretary Sarah Sanders’ family were followed by the owner of the restaurant they were kicked out of over the weekend after they settled an alternative place to dine, according to her father Mike Huckabee.
During an interview Monday on Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s radio show, Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, said Stephanie Wilkinson, owner of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., tailed Sanders’ in-laws across the street and along with a number of other people protested their presence at the restaurant to which they had migrated.
This restaurateur of The Red Hen Stephanie Wilkinson not only told @PressSec Sanders to leave–acc to @GovMikeHuckabee on my radio show today, she FOLLOWED Sanders’ family across the street to harass them at the other restaurant they went to! https://t.co/DEo2QOAcTY
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) June 25, 2018
“Once Sarah and her family left — and of course Sarah was asked to please vacate, Sarah and her husband just went home. They had sort of had enough. But the rest of her family went across the street to a different restaurant,” Huckabee said on “The Laura Ingraham Show.” “The owner of the Red Hen — nobody’s told this — then followed them across the street, called people and organized a protest yelling and screaming at them from outside the other restaurant and creating this scene.”
The initial incident happened when Wilkinson asked Sanders to leave because she works for President Trump.
Sanders tweeted about the incident Saturday, saying she “politely left.”
“Her actions say far more about her than me,” she said on Twitter. “I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so.”
Explaining her side of the story, Wilkinson told the Washington Post that she asked Sanders to leave because the Red Hen has “certain standards that I felt it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation.”
[Related: Washington Post joins call for civility after Sarah Sanders kicked out of restaurant]
Trump on Monday called the Red Hen “filthy” and “dirty.”
News of the Red Hen incident came after activists with the D.C. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America crashed Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s dinner Tuesday evening at a Mexican restaurant and appeared to chase her from the building.
Further stoaking uproar on the Right, Rep. Maxine Waters said Sunday that U.S. citizens should band together to force Trump administration officials out of retailers like department stores.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to add Mike Huckabee to the headline.
