White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany got into a heated debate with a reporter over discarded ballots on Thursday.
Fox News Radio White House correspondent Jon Decker peppered McEnany with questions at a press briefing about one example President Trump recently cited in his repeated criticisms of mail-in voting.
“The other day [the president] said, ‘They found a lot of ballots in a river.’ Who is ‘they’?” the reporter asked.
“What the president was referring to are something that we’ve seen just in the last seven days where, in Wisconsin, there were trails of mail ending up in a ditch,” McEnany replied. “I believe the specific he was referring to — and that included absentee ballots.”
Decker pointed out that McEnany said the ballots were found “in a ditch,” while the president said they were located “in a river.”
“In this particular statement, though, who is ‘they’ that found those ballots, and where is this river anywhere in this country?” he asked.
“Local authorities,” she replied. “It was a ditch in Wisconsin that they were found in. I can get the article to your inbox, if you’d like. … That’s what the president was referring to. And you really, you’re missing the forest for the trees here.”
They continued going back and forth, with Decker saying that he likes “to report accurately the news.”
“This is what is happening here,” McEnany argued. “You are ignoring the problem here. Which is last week, in Pennsylvania, you had ballots found in a ditch. That’s a fact. In Wisconsin, seven military ballots all marked for Trump were found cast aside. There are problems with mass mail-in voting. I actually don’t understand the lack of journalistic curiosity in reporting on this. There used to be curiosity.”
As she questioned why there wasn’t more “journalist curiosity” on the subject, Decker said, “I just want to know where the river is. I’m very curious — where is the river?”
It would appear that McEnany confused the incidents in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin toward the end of that exchange.
The Outagamie County Sheriff’s Office discovered the trays of mail, including absentee ballots, in a ditch near Appleton International Airport in Greenville, Wisconsin, last week, after which the United States Postal Inspection Service opened an investigation.
The Justice Department said a “small number” of military ballots were found to have been accidentally “discarded” in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. The DOJ initially said all of the ballots they had recovered in this incident, fewer than a dozen, had been cast for the president — as McEnany said Thursday, however, that failed to reflect how the agency quickly amended its statement to say that “the contents of those 2 ballots are unknown.”
