House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed President Trump’s team on Friday for leaking details of her plans to travel commercially to Afghanistan, saying he made the trip too dangerous for all involved.
She said the State Department told her not to come, now that her arrival was known.
“It was very irresponsible on the part of the president,” she said, specifically blaming the administration for “leaking” details of her commercial travel.
The White House called her accusations a “flat-out lie.”
“When the Speaker of the house and about 20 others from Capitol Hill decide to book their own commercial flights to Afghanistan, the world is going to find out. The idea we would leak anything that would put the safety and security of any American at risk is a flat-out lie,” an official said.
Mrs. Pelosi, for her part, brushed aside a question asking why she thought a leak had come from the White House.
When told the White House denied it, she said, “I rest my case.”
She said Mr. Trump’s “inexperience” may excuse his move to make her plans public, but she said other people around the president should have known better.
Mr. Trump released a stunning letter Thursday announcing that he had canceled the military jet that had been scheduled to take Mrs. Pelosi and a delegation of members of Congress to Brussels and Afghanistan. The president said it was a bad idea for her to go amid the shutdown — though he said she could always fly commercially, if she was intent on leaving Washington.
Mrs. Pelosi’s office said they made plans to do just that, but apparently the president’s public letter soured those plans.
“We weren’t going to go bc we had a report from Afghanistan the president outing our trip had made the scene on the ground much more dangerous,” she said. “You never give advance notice of going into a battle area.”
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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