“I don’t think I have to explain myself if I’m not going on TV if I’m out with four kids for three days looking at houses and schools,” President Donald Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway told Fox News Channel primetime star Sean Hannity tonight in re her absence from TV for more than a week. “A lot of my colleagues aren’t trying to figure out how to be a mother of four kids, I assure you.”
Conway also insisted only “about 5% of what I’m being asked to do in this White House counselor role is TV” these days.”
“[Trump] is the president now, and he is his own best messenger,” she said. “Just last week he held a press conference for 77 minutes took 17 questions. You got that information for free, all at the same time. Then two days later, he was at a rally in Florida. So he’s his own best messenger.”
TV news has been dramatically Conway-free for more than a week now. The Hannity appearance is her first since CNN reported that the Trump White House had decided to put Conway on TV time-out in the wake of the “Flynn debacle.” Conway has done at least one radio interview in that period, and has been seen sitting with other Trump surrogates on the sidelines during White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s briefings.
Conway told MSNBC on February 13 that then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had the president’s “full confidence” — hours before he resigned. That put White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer in the awkward position of having to explain, with a straight face, that those two seemingly contradictory things could live side-by-side, because Donald Trump is an exec who takes his time but moves swiftly once he’s made a decision. Flynn’s resignation came shortly after WaPo published a report the Justice Department had told the White House a month ago it believed Flynn had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his communication with the Russian ambassador to the U.S., which left himself open to possible blackmail.
Conway also claimed Flynn had offered to resign, which is harder to reconcile with Spicer’s assertion – and Trump’s in the days that followed – that POTUS asked Flynn to resign.
That came on the heels of her having delivered a QVC-esque plug to “Go buy Ivanka’s stuff” from the White House Press Briefing Room, during an appearance on FNC’s Fox & Friends, after President Trump tweeted his displeasure that Nordstrom was dropping Ivanka’s clothing line. And, earlier this month, in an interview on MSNBC, Conway revealed that two Iraqi men came to this country during the Obama administration, were radicalized and “were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green Massacre.”
But did not happen. Conway later explained she had meant to say Bowling Green attackers, though she had told the same “massacre” story on two previous occasions.
