"Her actions say far more about her than about me," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders wrote of the owner of the restaurant. | Win McNamee/Getty Images Sanders says she was kicked out of restaurant because she works for Trump

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed Saturday that she was kicked out of a Virginia restaurant on Friday evening simply because she works for President Donald Trump.

"Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, VA to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left," Sanders wrote on her official press secretary Twitter account. "Her actions say far more about her than about me."


Though the particulars of the incident could not be immediately confirmed, the tweet qualified as an uncommonly specific attack from an official White House account on a private business.

Stephanie Wilkinson, co-owner of the Red Hen, told The Washington Post that the decision to ask Sanders to leave came after conversations with her staff. Wilkinson said some of her staff members are openly gay and were aghast at the Trump's administration's push to ban transgender service members along with the fact that she believes Sanders works for an "inhumane and unethical" administration.

"I would have done the same thing again,” Wilkinson said. "We just felt there are moments in time when people need to live their convictions. This appeared to be one."

Wilkinson added that she asked only Sanders to leave but that her husband, Bryan, under whose name the reservation was made, and the rest of the party followed her out. Sanders and her guests offered to pay for cheese boards that had already been delivered, but Wilkinson said those were on the house, the Post reported.

On Friday night, Jaike Foley-Schultz, who described himself as a waiter at the Red Hen in Lexington, wrote on Facebook that he had just just served Sanders before she was asked to leave. Sanders did not mention family members in her account of the episode, but the post would seem to match what the press secretary tweeted Saturday.

"I just served Sarah huckabee sanders [sic] for a total of 2 minutes before my owner asked her to leave and she complied," Foley-Schultz wrote. "Her family left on their own accord, we didn't actually refuse service or 'kick her out.'"

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Lexington, located about 180 miles southwest of Washington, D.C., is home to the Virginia Military Institute and Washington and Lee University.

Sanders would not have been the first member of the Trump administration to experience grief in public for their work.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen's dinner at MXDC, a Mexican restaurant in Washington, was interrupted Tuesday by protesters from the Democratic Socialists of America, who shouted at her "Shame" and "If kids don't eat in peace, you don't eat in peace." Demonstrators chanted outside her Virginia townhouse on Friday morning. In both instances, Nielsen was singled out for her defense of the administration's zero tolerance immigration policy, which resulted in the separations of some migrant families.

Stephen Miller, a White House senior adviser who has been viewed as the architect of the administration's recent immigration policy, also tried to eat at a Washington-area Mexican restaurant and had a patron call him a "fascist" last Sunday, according to the New York Post.

Sanders' predecessor, Sean Spicer, was confronted at an Apple store in the D.C. area in March 2017 by a woman who asked him: "How does it feel to work for a fascist?" Other Trump staffers told POLITICO Magazine that they are sometimes the object of obscene gestures when leaving the White House grounds.

In her statement about being asked to leave the Red Hen in Lexington — which is not affiliated with the D.C. establishment of the same name — Sanders said she would not treat someone with whom she disagreed in a similar manner.

"I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so," she wrote on Twitter.

Mike Huckabee, Sanders' father, defended her on Twitter, saying "bigotry is on the menu" at the restaurant. Earlier Saturday, Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and now a conservative commentator, tweeted a photo, supposedly of MS-13 gang members, with the caption: "Nancy Pelosi introduces her campaign committee for the take back of the House."

Sanders has trashed reporters to their faces during White House press briefings, which are often aired on national television. For instance, during a back and forth with Jim Acosta on June 14, Sanders chided the veteran CNN reporter for pressing her on comments Attorney General Jeff Sessions made about the Bible and family separations.

"I know it's hard for you to understand even short sentences, I guess, but please don't take my words out of context," Sanders said.