MSNBC "Morning Joe" co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski Tuesday accused White House counsel Kellyanne Conway of making "blatantly false" statements to the media during her numerous interviews, with Scarborough commenting she is a "free agent" who is causing trouble for the Trump administration.
"Everyone in the White House but [President] Donald Trump has complained for months," Scarborough said. "She's a free agent, she goes out and says whatever she wants to say. Then she comes back in and they have to clean it up. She goes out and lies and you find out about those lies an hour later."
Brzezinski accused Conway of saying "whatever serves herself," and that she'll complain she's been victimized because she's a woman.
"I could not interview her," Brzezinski said, as Conway is "giving people dishonesty. It's not worth the interview."
After Conway makes her comments, Scarborough said, "she will then go in and get a picture with the president and get the president to tweet something, and his staff will have to clean it up all over and over again. They have been doing this for four months. She's a free agent. She goes out on her own. They spend half their time cleaning up after her."
Their comments came after Conway on Monday told MSNBC that retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn had Trump's "full confidence" — before Flynn's resignation as national security adviser was announced later Monday night.
The White House, however, did not confirm her assertions.
An hour later, however, Trump was being asked by reporters if he did have "full confidence" in Flynn, reports NPR. Instead, the president deferred to press secretary Sean Spicer, who read a statement, saying that Trump has been "speaking to Vice President [Mike] Pence, relative to the conversation the vice president had with Gen. Flynn and also speaking to various other people about what he considers the single most important subject there is, our national security."
Flynn's resignation came after several days of concern that he may have misled Pence over his communications with Russia before Trump officially took office. Flynn at that time denied speaking with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, and Pence spoke on several Sunday shows, reporting what Flynn had told him on the issue.
"Morning Joe" co-host Willie Geist said that if Conway was going to be put out for interviews, she should be on the same page as the White House.
He also noted that CNN and others are reporting that when Conway went on MSNBC Monday, what she was saying was true "as far as the White House knew it," but the information Spicer gave them was in real time.
The information about Flynn, however, has been available for a month, and Scarborough claimed that Conway's comments came from being "out of the loop," and that she's "been out of the loop for months now."
"It goes to management structure time and time again," said Scarborough. "I asked Donald Trump one time in the middle of chaos, who is your person? Who is the person that can come in and talk to you and tell you you were wrong, you were off base, this is how we need to right the show. He said, I'm the person.
"That's the wrong answer. The president of the United States cannot be dealing with the day to day drudgery of running a massive operation."
Washington Post associate editor David Ignatius, though, said that the "buck does stop" on Trump's desk.
"These things happen and often presidents don't step in when they should," said Ignatius. "In this place, Flynn is leading and the candidates are from everything we know outstanding people who will run a better process.
"This process is so difficult to manage. The president can't do it alone. He has to have the right person."
"They need to do a lot more reading," said Scarborough. "They need to measure their words so carefully. They need to stop people like Kellyanne Conway going out and giving bad information. They need to sit, retext everything.
"They have to strain every word. They have to take every word through a strainer, squeeze every word and start being exact. Words matter."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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