Trump campaign blames ‘attention-seeking’ Breitbart reporter for incident

Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields made headlines Tuesday evening after her boyfriend, Daily Caller senior editor Jamie Weinstein, claimed on Twitter that Lewandowski “tried to pull [Fields] to [the] ground when she asked [Trump] a tough [question].” Fields was covering the GOP front-runner’s press conference in Jupiter, Fla.

But in a statement released Thursday, Trump’s campaign described that accusation as “entirely false” and said campaign staffers would “never do anything to harm another individual.”

“This person claims she does not want to be part of the news, and only report it,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks wrote in a statement to ABC News hours after Fields published an article offering a first-hand description of what she alleges happened. “However, if that was the case, any concerns, however unfounded they may be, should have been voiced directly first and not via Twitter. …”

“Especially since no other outlet or reporter witnessed or questioned anything that transmitted that evening,” Hicks added. Washington Post reporter Ben Terris, who was also present at the press conference, wrote about the incident Thursday afternoon, though it is unclear whether his article was published before or after Hicks issued her statement.

Breitbart CEO Larry Solov replied Thursday afternoon by saying the company stands behind its reporter’s claim.

“The Washington Post just published a very detailed, first-hand account from their senior reporter Ben Terris who is familiar with the campaign, the personalities involved, and was an eyewitness to the incident,” Solov said. “We are disappointed in the campaign’s response, in particular their effort to demean Michelle’s previous reporting. Michelle Fields is an intrepid reporter who has covered tough and dangerous stories. We stand behind her reporting, her techniques, and call again on Corey Lewandowski to apologize.”

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has tried to downplay Fields’ allegations by implying that Fields seems to have a history of being part of the story. Shortly after Hicks responded to requests for comment, Lewandowski tweeted a link to an article from 2011 about Fields being assaulted by NYPD officers during the “Occupy” protests in Manhattan.

“Professional reporting or attention seeking?” he wrote in the tweet.

Minutes later, Lewandowski again called Fields “an attention seeker” and linked to an article about her on GotNews.com, a website owned by Chuck Johnson, a journalist who’s repeatedly been accused of unethical reporting and was banned from Twitter in May 2015.

In her own statement, Hicks, too, suggested that Fields is seeking something other than an apology from Lewandowski.

“We leave to others whether this is part of a larger pattern of exaggerating incidents, but on multiple occasions she has become part of the news story as opposed to reporting it,” she wrote.

Fields responded Thursday with a photograph that showed bruising on her forearm, which she alleges Lewandowski “tightly” grabbed to nearly bring her to the ground.

“I guess these just magically appeared on me,” she wrote in a tweet directed at Lewandowski and Trump. “So weird.”