Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-FL) said on Saturday that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly should apologize to the nation for his false claims about her speech at a federal building ceremony.
“General Kelly owes the nation an apology,” Wilson tweeted. “When he lied about me, he lied to the American public.”
The Florida Democrat’s biting remark comes about a month after a hostile back-and-forth with Kelly, who claimed Wilson had bragged about getting the funding for a federal building during her speech at the building’s dedication ceremony in 2015.
Wilson slammed Kelly’s comments as a “lie,” and shortly afterwards, the Sun Sentinel backed her up with a video that proved Kelly’s claims were false and that the congresswoman hadn’t mentioned funding at all, in fact.
The entire debacle was sparked by the controversy over President Donald Trump’s phone call to the widow of recently-fallen Sgt. La David T. Johnson in October.
Wilson, a family friend to the Johnsons and who was present for the call, had said Trump didn’t even mention the soldier’s name and told the widow that Johnson “knew what what he was signing up for.”
The widow was left in tears, according to Wilson.
Trump vehemently denied her account of the call multiple times, and Kelly took to the podium during a White House press briefing to berate the Democrat for both going public with the call and for supposedly boasting about the building funds.
Despite the video, the White House doubled down on Kelly’s comments, and Kelly himself told Fox host Laura Ingraham that he has no plans to apologize.
“Never,” Kelly said. “I’ll apologize if I need to. But for something like this, absolutely not. I stand by my comments.”