Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., again raised the issue of race as she slammed the White House en masse, after a video was released that confirmed White House chief of staff John Kelly had inaccurately portrayed her remarks at a dedication of an FBI building.
“The White House itself is full of white supremacists,” she told the New York Times on Friday.
Video footage of the event, published by the Sun Sentinel on Friday, shows Wilson discussing her role sponsoring legislation to name the building after fallen FBI agents who were killed in a shootout with bank robbers in 1986.
“I feel very sorry for him because he feels such a need to lie on me and I’m not even his enemy,” Wilson said. “I just can’t even imagine why he would fabricate something like that. That is absolutely insane. I’m just flabbergasted because it’s very easy to trace.”
Wilson also condemned the White House team.
“They are making themselves look like fools. They have no credibility,” she added. “They are trying to assassinate my character, and they are assassinating their own because everything they say is coming out and shown to be a lie.”
Kelly claimed during a press briefing Thursday that Wilson had said “she got the money” for a new FBI building during a ceremony in 2015 honoring the heroism of FBI agents killed in a shootout with bank robbers in Miami. Kelly also criticized her reaction to President Trump’s condolence call to a Gold Star widow this week.
“A congresswoman stood up, and in a long tradition of empty barrels making the most noise, stood up there in all of that and talked about how she was instrumental in getting the funding for that building, and how she took care of her constituents because she got the money, and she just called up President Obama, and on that phone call, he gave the money, the $20 million, to build the building, and she sat down,” Kelly told reporters. Wilson refuted Kelly’s remarks Thursday night and said the money had already been approved even before she became a member of Congress. The legislation she had sponsored had been enacted three days before the August 2015 ceremony.
The White House has stood by Kelly’s account of the events; White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders defended him Friday.
“Gen. Kelly said he was ‘stunned’ that Rep. Wilson made comments at a building dedication honoring slain FBI agents about her own actions in Congress, including lobbying former President Obama on legislation,” Sanders said in a statement. “As Gen. Kelly pointed out, if you’re able to make a sacred act like honoring American heroes about yourself, you’re an empty barrel.”
Wilson later said she thought the “empty barrel” characterization was “racist.”
The crux of Kelly’s emotional plea Thursday came as a defense of President Trump in response to Wilson’s claim that Trump was insensitive as he told the widow of one of the four soldiers killed in Niger this month that her husband “knew what he signed up for … but when it happens, it hurts anyway.”
“It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation,” he said. “I thought at least that was sacred.”
