NYT reporter busts Trump officials for lying about things they said on the record mere hours earlier
Former Trump White House Director of Legislative Affairs Marc Short appears on CNN (Screen cap).
September 04, 2019
On Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence's chief of staff Marc Short told reporters that President Donald Trump had "suggested" that the vice president stay at one of his own hotels during his stay in Ireland, despite the fact that takes three hours to drive from there to the Irish capital of Dublin.
"I don’t think it was a request, like a command," Short said while explaining the president's role in getting Pence to stay at his hotel. "I think that it was a suggestion."
However, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman writes that the White House later in the day denied that Trump had made any suggestion regarding Pence staying at his hotel, and they accused the media of getting facts wrong to make the president look bad.
"Pence officials said on the record that the president suggested Pence stay at his hotel," Haberman writes on Twitter. "Later in the day Pence’s office called stories quoting those statements false and blamed the press."
By Wednesday morning, however, the White House had again changed its tune. Per CNN's Jim Acosta, the White House is admitting that Short had told reporters that Trump made the suggestion about the hotel, and is now claiming that Pence's own staff members were the ones who recommended staying at the Trump property.