Brewer Defends Comment On Dad Fighting Nazis: ‘You’re Trying To Make A Liar Out Of Me’

Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ)
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Gov. Jan Brewer is angry about the dust-up over her comment that her father “died fighting the Nazi regime in Germany.”

In an interview with the Arizona Guardian, Brewer said she never “misled anybody,” and said she’s “fairly devastated by this.”

There is no way I have ever misled anybody. You’re trying to make a liar out of me.

Brewer had told The Arizona Republic in a recent interview that her father “died fighting the Nazi regime in Germany.”

But according to the Guardian, Brewer’s father, Wilford Drinkwine, died of lung disease in California in 1955. A Brewer spokesperson said that Drinkwine had inhaled toxic fumes while working during the war as a civilian supervisor for a naval munititions depot in Nevada. The spokesperson said the fumes eventually killed him, and that he was on full medical disability at the time of his death.

As we noted yesterday, it does seems entirely possible that Brewer simply meant that her father died of an illness that was a direct cause of his employment at a wartime munitions factory.

Here’s Brewer’s original full quote, in which she’s referring to criticism she’s taken over her state’s controversial new immigration law.

Knowing that my father died fighting the Nazi regime in Germany, that I lose him when I was 11 because of that…and then to have them call me Hitler’s daughter. It hurts. It’s ugliness beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.

“I am fairly devastated by this, for what it’s worth,” Brewer told the Guardian on Wednesday.

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