Kellyanne Conway, counsel to President Trump, on Monday said she has received pieces of mail that contained suspicious white powder on multiple occasions and has had to employ a security detail for her personal protection as a result of the media’s coverage of the new administration.
This was shared matter-of-factly while discussing the press pool’s false report over the weekend that the Martin Luther King Jr. bust had been removed from the Oval Office.
“We let the pool press in … and immediately the print pooler sent out the pool report that the MLK bust had been removed. It is false. I don’t want to say his name publicly because I don’t want him to get attacked like I do.
“Because of what the press is doing now to me, I have Secret Service protection. We have packages delivered to my house with white substances. That is a shame,” Conway told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday evening.
The statement was the first time that Conway, the first woman to lead a presidential candidate to victory, has disclosed the alleged incidents to the public. She did not state whether Trump or Vice President Mike Pence have received suspicious packages in the mail as well.
Conway circled back to the bust incident, which the press had reported because former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s bust had been added to the Oval Office and the media had missed and thus presumed King’s had been taken away.
“He [the unnamed pool reporter] apologized to his colleagues in the press. He has not apologized to the president and the damage is done because then people look at Donald Trump as the R word,” Conway said, referring to the word “racist.”
“The darn bust was right there. I was next to it. It was being hidden by a guard. But why didn’t you ask us? Why didn’t you didn’t you say ‘where’s the bust?'”
Conway dubbed the media’s actions evidence of its “presumptive negativity.” Her rebuke did not stop there.
“If they want to call themselves journalists and reporters, they ought to think about what they’re really doing. If they snark, if they roll their eyes, if their twitter feed is filled with 92 percent anti-Trump’s tweets, they’re not being reporters, they’re being opinion columnists, they’re being professional political hacks and pundits, and we have a right to call that out,” she finished.
