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Trump doubles down on false claim about Obama and Gold Star families

President Trump on Tuesday defended his false charge that ex-President Obama didn’t call Gold Star families — saying that reporters should ask his chief of staff if Obama had called him after his son was killed in Afghanistan.

“You could ask General [John] Kelly, did he get a call from Obama?” a defiant Trump said in a radio interview with Fox News, a reference to the late 1st Lt. Robert Michael Kelly, 29, a Marine who was mortally wounded after stepping on a landmine.

“I don’t know what Obama’s policy was. I write letters and I also call,” the commander-in-chief said, saying he called “virtually everybody” since he was sworn in.

A White House official later told NBC News that Obama did not call Kelly when his son was killed in 2010 — but it wasn’t clear if the president had written to him or called or written the younger Kelly’s widow.





Trump on Monday falsely claimed that Obama and other past presidents didn’t do as much as he had done to console the grieving families of fallen soldiers.

“If you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls — a lot of them didn’t make calls,” Trump said on Monday during a Rose Garden press conference when asked about four soldiers killed in Niger earlier this month.

Until Monday, the president had said nothing publicly about their deaths.

“I like to make calls when it’s appropriate,” he added.

When challenged on that baseless claim — Trump backtracked and blamed “the generals” for giving him bad information.

“President Obama, I think, probably did sometimes, and maybe sometimes he didn’t. I don’t know. That’s what I was told. All I can do — all I can do is ask my generals,” he said.





Former Obama administration members called the statement a lie, with Obama’s former deputy chief of staff Alyssa Mastromonaco‏ angrily denouncing the president as “a deranged animal” on Twitter.

Another noted that Obama had written thousands of letters and made hundreds of calls to Gold Star families.

“President Obama engaged families of the fallen and wounded warriors throughout his presidency through calls, letters, visits to Section 60 at Arlington, visits to Walter Reed, visits to Dover, and regular meetings with Gold Star Families at the White House and across the country,” an ex-official told NBC News.

Trump said Tuesday that he “will be calling, have called, and will be calling the parents and loved ones, wives of the soldiers that recently were killed” but that he wanted to wait for the right time.

The soldiers were killed in an ambush by ISIS fighters on Oct. 4 and arrived at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Oct. 7 — a Saturday, while the president was playing golf.





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