Former White House press secretary and communications director Sean Spicer has been accused of “gaslighting Americans” and including multiple inaccuracies in his new memoir, “The Briefing.”
According to ABC News’ Jon Karl, Spicer’s book is “much like his tenure as press secretary: short, littered with inaccuracies and offering up one consistent theme: Mr. Trump can do no wrong.”
[Also read: Sean Spicer calls Matt Drudge ‘a huge influencer…driving news for the last couple of decades’]
In a review for the Wall Street Journal, Karl outlined a variety of factual inaccuracies in the book, and argued that Spicer had “not been well served by the book’s fact checkers and copy editors.”
For example, he noted that the author of the so-called “Trump dossier” that contains scandalous and unverified material on Trump’s ties to Russia was referred to as Michael Steele, rather than the former British spy Christopher Steele.
Additionally, there is a reference to a reporter asking former President Barack Obama a question at the White House in 1999, even though Obama wasn’t elected until 2008.
Karl also condemned Spicer for characterizing former Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., as a “fun to be around” and “good to staff,” but omitting that Foley stepped down from his post after it was revealed he had sent sexually inappropriate messages to underage male congressional pages.
Erik Wemple of the Washington Post slammed Spicer for “gaslighting” the American public because he describes Trump as having a “deep vein of compassion and sympathy” and a “man of Christian instincts and feelings.” These descriptions aren’t what that most Americans associate Trump with, Wemple claimed.
“Yet ‘The Briefing’ isn’t a political memoir, nor is it a work of recent history, nor a tell-all, or tell-anything,” Wemple wrote in the Washington Post. “Rather, it is a bumbling effort at gaslighting Americans into doubting what they have seen with their own eyes as far back as June 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy and labeled Mexican immigrants as rapists, beginning a pattern of racist attacks.”
Spicer’s publisher, Regnery Publishing, did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
Spicer resigned as White House press secretary in July 2017 after Anthony Scaramucci was named the White House communications director. Scaramucci was fired from the White House 10 days after taking on the position.
