White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany slammed Jake Tapper after the CNN anchor accused her of being a serial liar to justify not bringing her on his show.
McEnany responded to Tapper’s accusation in a tweet on Sunday after the anchor appeared on another CNN program, “Reliable Sources” with host Brian Stelter, to reminisce about the network’s coverage of the Trump administration for the past four years. McEnany called the segment between Stelter and Tapper a “therapy session.”
“This is a therapy session for a broken network, and @jaketapper is lazy enough to participate by lobbing baseless personal attacks, with ZERO evidence,” McEnany tweeted. “Jake’s real problem: I do not leak. I do not lie.”
“But I DO call out the lies of the media (i.e. CNN Russia collusion hoax!)” the White House press secretary added.
This is a therapy session for a broken network, and @jaketapper is lazy enough to participate by lobbing baseless personal attacks, with ZERO evidence.
Jake’s real problem:
I do not leak.
I do not lie.
But I DO call out the lies of the media (i.e. CNN Russia collusion hoax!) https://t.co/Gz0RWbwhJZ
— Kayleigh McEnany (@kayleighmcenany) December 27, 2020
Tapper lumped together Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller with McEnany as examples of allies of President Donald Trump that he would not allow on his show because they “tell lies the way that most people breathe.”
“There are some people that are such, they’re just so mendacious I just wouldn’t put them on air. Kayleigh McEnany, I never booked her. Jason Miller from the Trump campaign, I would never book him. I mean, these are just people who just, they just tell lies the way that most people breathe. There is no value in that,” Tapper said, responding to a prompt from Stelter, who complained that repeated appearances of White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway on his show seemed “less valuable.”
“I don’t view Kellyanne Conway the same way. She was the senior adviser to the president. She was more of a filibusterer and a subject changer, I thought,” Tapper said as Stelter bobbed his head and voiced agreement, “than a liar. And I think it’s different, I really do, and there is a risk in lumping everybody together. There is a big difference between somebody like Kayleigh McEnany who just, like, this is what she does, she tells lies all the time. She can’t acknowledge reality, so I’m just not going to put someone like that on air.”
Both Stelter and Tapper have featured other notorious figures such as celebrity attorney Michael Avenatti. Avenatti was sentenced to prison in February for attempting to extort $25 million from the sportswear company Nike. On top of his guilt in the Nike case, Avenatti has also been accused of stealing from a former client, porn actress Stormy Daniels, whom Avenatti represented in a case against Trump.
While he was representing Daniels, copious media coverage from networks such as CNN allowed Avenatti to gain prominence as a resistance figure fighting the Trump administration. He gained more attention by taking on another high profile client, Julie Swetnick, who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct without corroborative evidence. Avenatti and Swetnick were referred to the Department of Justice for criminal action based on those allegations.