ABC News(WASHINGTON) — Kellyanne Conway isn’t the only member of the Trump administration citing a terror attack that never happened: White House press secretary Sean Spicer is just as guilty, having recently alluded three times to an attack in Atlanta.
Spicer first made an Atlanta reference during a Jan. 29 appearance on ABC’s This Week, telling chief global affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz, “What do we say to the family who loses somebody over a terroristic [sic] — to whether it’s Atlanta or San Bernardino or the Boston bomber? Those people, each of whom had gone out to a country and then come back.”
And the head-scratching continued the next day while on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, when he argued that there are too many instances of terrorism in the U.S, “whether you’re talking about San Bernardino, Atlanta.”
Seemingly unfazed by the previous two mentions of a terror attack in Atlanta, Spicer again cited such an attack during a press briefing just hours after his MSNBC interview.
He mentioned Atlanta after being asked by a reporter why countries with terrorist ties are not included in President Trump’s travel ban. “We’re reviewing the entire process over this period of time to make sure that we do this right,” Spicer said. “But I don’t think you have to look any further than the families of the Boston Marathon, in Atlanta, in San Bernardino to ask if we can go further.”
A string of bombings, carried out by domestic terrorist Eric Rudolph in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics, did occur in Atlanta. But that’s not what Spicer has been referring to.
In an email to ABC News Wednesday, Spicer finally addressed his repeated reference to an Atlanta terror attack, writing that he “clearly meant Orlando.”
Spicer’s about-face, claiming that he was referring to the deadly massacre in June at Orlando’s gay Pulse nightclub, comes on the heels of Conway’s repeated reference to the non-existent Bowling Green Massacre, which she has now acknowledged never happened.
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