Kayleigh McEnany Insists She Never Lied as Press Secretary, Bless Her Heart

Kayleigh McEnany—whose name I unfortunately still remember how to spell without having to look it up—is attempting to put a convenient revisionist spin on her time in the Trump administration.

At Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit (a colossal joke of an event to begin with), McEnany maintained she had never lied as White House press secretary, despite her extensive record of almost constant lies.

During her speech at the summit, McEnany returned to a moment from the beginning of her tenure, when a reporter asked if she would pledge never to lie at White House press briefings. McEnany agreed to be truthful with reporters, but just 15 minutes later she went on to call the sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh “verifiably false” despite plenty of reporting showing that the allegations against him are credible.

McEnany, of course, remembers it differently: “And I said without hesitation, ‘No,’” McEnany told the Turning Point USA crowd over the weekend. “And I never did. As a woman of faith, as a mother of baby Blake, as a person who meticulously prepared at some of the world’s hardest institutions, I never lied. I sourced my information.”

McEnany may have “sourced” some of her information, but when she did it was from outlets whose relationship to the truth was as tenuous as her own.

Leading up to the 2020 election, McEnany peddled lies about mail-in voting being pushed on Fox News and other conservative outlets; after Trump lost, she advanced his false allegations about voter fraud and election rigging that culminated in the attacks on Capitol. As I wrote for Jezebel in January in a send-off to her predecessor Sean Spicer, McEnany’s lies were the ones to result in some of the Trump administration’s most violent material consequences.

And there’s little reason to believe McEnany will stop lying anytime soon: Fox News now employs her to do exactly that as a co-host of “Outnumbered.”