Sean Spicer’s Book Is Apparently ‘Littered With Inaccuracies’

White House spokesman Sean Spicer gestures during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, DC, on June 20, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / NICHOLAS KAMM (Photo credit should read NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)
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Former White House press secretary and communications director Sean Spicer’s book is riddled with elementary errors, according to a Tuesday review in the Wall Street Journal.

ABC News chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl, who lived through Spicer’s legendarily dishonest press briefings, wrote for the Journal that Spicer’s memoir, “The Briefing,” “is much like his tenure as press secretary: short, littered with inaccuracies and offering up one consistent theme: Mr. Trump can do no wrong.”

Spicer recently couldn’t even get through a brief television interview without telling several falsehoods.

Karl lists some basic mistakes in the book:

He refers to the author of the infamous Trump dossier as “ Michael Steele, ” who is in truth the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, not the British ex-spy Christopher Steele. He recounts a reporter asking Mr. Obama a question at a White House press conference in 1999, a decade before Mr. Obama was elected. There are also some omissions: He writes about working for Rep. Mark Foley (R., Fla.), who he says “knew how to manage the news cycle. And on top of all that, he was good to staff and fun to be around.” He never gets around to mentioning that Mr. Foley later resigned in disgrace for sending sexually explicit messages to teenage boys working as congressional pages.

Elsewhere, Spicer asserts that “In the minds of many in the press, the First Amendment is solely about them and their rights;” and that President Donald Trump, when he skipped the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, was in “some in the media’s” opinion, “somehow assaulting the First Amendment.” 

“Rarely do reporters have their integrity questioned the way Jonathan questioned mine,” Spicer writes separately, reflecting on when Karl asked him if he would always attempt to tell the truth.

As Karl points out in his review: False, false and false.

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