The Florida congresswoman at the center of a controversy on Sunday said White House chief of staff John Kelly owes the nation an apology for falsely accusing her of boasting that she secured $20 million in federal funding for an FBI office in Miami.
Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., also called the ambush in Niger “Trump’s (Benghazi).”
Kelly last Thursday said he was “stunned” to learn Wilson took credit for the funding of the building during its dedication in 2015, but a video from the ceremony contradicted those claims.
Wilson in the video was described as "generous and graceful in sharing credit for how legislation naming the building was fast-tracked." She also spent most of her nine-minute speech praising the two FBI agents for whom the building was named.
“John Kelly is almost, I guess you could say he was a puppet of the president and what he was trying to do was divert the attention away from the president onto me. He basically just lied on me,” Wilson said on MSNBC’s AMJoy.
“The character assassination he went through … not only does he owe me an apology. He owes an apology to the American people.”
President Donald Trump and Kelly have been in a verbal back-and-forth with Wilson ever since she accused the president of being insensitive during a phone call to the widow of Green Beret Sgt. La David Johnson, who was killed in Niger when 50 ISIS fighters ambushed his team. Three other Green Berets were also killed in the attack.
Wilson on Sunday also said the Niger incident is Trump’s Benghazi, referring to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead.