Kayleigh McEnany on Sunday said she "never lied."
 

Kayleigh McEnany claimed she 'never lied' as White House press secretary. Here are 5 times she did.

By Oma Seddiq and Grace Panetta

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Kayleigh McEnany recently claimed that she never lied in her role as former President Donald Trump's White House press secretary — but a look at her tenure shows the opposite.

"As a woman of faith, as a mother of baby Blake, as a person who meticulously prepared at some of the world's hardest institutions, I never lied. I sourced my information," McEnany told a crowd at a conservative summit on Sunday.

Shortly after her comments, critics pointed to many falsehoods the former spokeswoman spread during her time in Trump's White House, on topics ranging from COVID-19 to the 2020 election.

The White House press secretary operates as the president's No. 1 spokesperson, and the job often involves defending the boss, and stretching the truth. For McEnany, that meant sticking up for Trump, who repeatedly made misleading and false statements.

Now a Fox News commentator, McEnany served as Trump's press secretary from April 2020 until the end of his administration. Here are five times she lied over those nine months.

1. McEnany falsely stated that Trump never downplayed the coronavirus.

On September 9, leaked audio recordings revealed Trump admitting to downplaying the severity of COVID-19, which had claimed nearly 200,000 lives in the US by that point.

"I wanted to always play it down," Trump told journalist Bob Woodward in March as the virus was spreading rapidly across the country. "I still like playing it down, because I don't want to create a panic," he added.

During a press briefing that day, McEnany claimed that Trump "never downplayed the virus," despite her boss acknowledging he did just that.

McEnany further stretched the truth, saying: "The president has never lied to the American public on COVID."

Trump routinely misled the public on the coronavirus by insisting that the disease will soon disappear even though infection rates were surging around the country.

2. She backed Trump's false claims about the Mueller report.

At her first press briefing in May, McEnany repeated Trump's lie that special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation was a "complete and total exoneration" of him, Refinery29 reported.

Mueller's report said that while it "does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."

When the two-year FBI investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election came out in 2019, Trump tweeted: "No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION KEEP AMERICA GREAT."

3. McEnany pushed Trump's lies about the 2020 election.

When Trump began to falsely assert that he won the 2020 presidential election, McEnany doubled up as his campaign spokesperson and reiterated his claims.

On November 9, Fox News cut away from a Trump campaign press conference in which McEnany suggested, without evidence, that Democrats welcomed "fraud" and "illegal voting" in the race.

"Unless she has more details to back that up, I can't in good countenance continue to show you this," Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto said as he cut McEnany off.

In a December 8 appearance on Fox News' Sean Hannity's show, McEnany also backed a mathematically dubious and unfounded claim, lodged in a long-shot lawsuit from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, that then-candidate Joe Biden's chances of winning were "less than one in a quadrillion" based on Trump's lead in the ballot count at 3 a.m. on November 4.

Then, on December 15, the day after presidential electors to the Electoral College had cast their votes for Biden, McEnany suggested there could be "a continuation of power" in the Trump administration.

4. McEnany, like Trump, exaggerated numbers.

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On November 14, McEnany falsely claimed that 1 million people had attended the Million MAGA March in support of Trump in Washington, DC.

The actual crowd size for the march was estimated by multiple news outlets to be more in the range of thousands.

As Politifact noted, "it's mathematically impossible for more than 135,000 people to fit in the location that McEnany tweeted a photo of."

5. She falsely claimed that Trump was the first president to put a red ribbon on the White House for AIDS awareness.

McEnany made the inaccurate statement in response to a line of questioning from Washington Blade reporter Chris Johnson pressing McEnany on why his statement for World AIDS Day did not mention the disease's impact on the LGBTQ+ community.

"The president honored World AIDS Day yesterday in a way that no president has before, with the red ribbon there," McEnany said.

Both former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, however, similarly recognized World AIDS Day by affixing giant red ribbons to the front of the White House. Obama did so in 2012 and Bush did so as far back in 2007.

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Bonus: During her first White House briefing, McEnany made a promise to the press, saying, "I will never lie to you."

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