“It was an absolute delight hosting FLOTUS at Pakistan House today,” Jilani had said in his tweet.

Pakistan envoy to the United States, Jalil Abbas Jilani, has been strongly reprimanded for tweeting an image of him and his wife with the first lady Michelle Obama. “It was an absolute delight hosting FLOTUS at Pakistan House today,” Jilani had said in his tweet. The tweet along with the picture dispensed the impression that Ambassador Jilani has close ties with America’s first family, it said.In an official letter, the White House has showed displeasure and has accused the ambassador of breaching trust and being undiplomatic in his action, sources told Times Now.

But, Pakistan has rejected the reports calling them “baseless”. In a statement, the Foreign Office said the media reports published regarding a letter of displeasure from the White House to Pakistan’s ambassador to the US Jalil Abbas Jilani was “completely incorrect and baseless”. “No such letter from the White House has been received either in our Mission in Washington or this Ministry. It is nothing but a figment of the Reporter’s own imagination,” it said. It further said it was “unethical” on the part of the reporter, based in Washington, to have filed a “baseless story without verifying its authenticity.”

Michelle was invited to the ambassador’s residence — otherwise known as the Pakistan House — to participate in his son’s graduation party. Ambassador Jilani’s youngest son attended the same school as President Obama’s daughters Malia and Sasha. The envoy had removed the image from his twitter feed a few hours after tweeting it. The paper also reported that when asked to comment on the incident, the ambassador in his one-liner reply termed it as “incorrect”. The Pak-US ties strained after Congressional restriction on financing of F-16 fighter jet’s sale from Foreign Military Financing programme, due to which Pakistan could not buy the jets. The relationship further suffered when the US carried out a drone strike in Balochistan, killing the Taliban chief, which was termed by Pakistani leadership a violation of the country’s sovereignty.