Kellyanne Conway,
counselor to President Donald Trump, said the White House press secretary gave
"alternative facts" when he inaccurately described the inauguration
crowd as "the largest ever" during his first appearance before the
press this weekend.
White House Press
Secretary Sean Spicer gathered the press to deliver a five-minute statement
Saturday in which he issued multiple falsehoods, declaring erroneously the
number of people who used the D.C. metro on Friday, that there was a change in
security measures this year and that "this was the largest audience to
ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the
globe."
"These attempts to
lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong," Spicer
said Saturday.
However, crowd size
experts told the New
York Times they estimated Trump's audience at fewer than 200,000
people, and widely distributed side-by-side photographs showed the stark
contrast between the comparatively sparse crowd for Trump's inauguration and the
record-setting crowd for Obama's first.
Asked on "Meet the
Press" why Spicer used his first appearance before the press to dispute a
minimal issue like the inauguration crowd size, and why he used falsehoods to
do so, Conway pushed back.
"You're saying it's a
falsehood and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to
that," she told NBC's Chuck Todd.
She then went on to echo
Spicer's claim on Saturday that it wasn't possible to count the count, despite
Trump's team's accompanying insistence that it was the "largest
audience."
"I don't think you
can prove those numbers one way or another. There's no way to quantify crowd
numbers," Conway said.
Conway also suggested that
Todd's insistence on asking why Spicer delivered a demonstrably false statement
could affect the White House's treatment of the media.
"If we're going to
keep referring to the press secretary in those types of terms I think we're
going to have to rethink our relationship here," she said.
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