President Donald Trump reportedly said that anti-Semitic threats are sometimes called in "to make people or make others look bad" during a meeting Tuesday with state attorneys general.

Josh Shapiro, who was in D.C. for a national meeting of attorneys general, joined a contingent of top law enforcement officials to meet with U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The group was subsequently invited to the White House to meet with Trump in the East Room.

Shapiro, a Democrat who was elected in November, asked the president about a spate of threats and incidents of vandalism against Jewish institutions across the country over the past two months. Trump's response, he said, came as a surprise.

"He just said, 'sometimes it's the reverse,'" Shapiro recounted. "'[It's] to make people or make others look bad.' He used 'reverse' two to three times in his comments."

A request for comment with the White House Press Office was not immediately returned.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, the Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer cast doubt on the veracity of such threats and vandalism.

"When I see these bomb threats, I just assume it is Jews doing it. You see how it fits right into their narrative of victimhood under Trump," the publisher of that site wrote, earlier this month.

Shapiro said the president called the acts reprehensible and vowed to address the issue further in his speech before a joint session of Congress Tuesday at 9 p.m.

"I hope he'll speak specifically how we can collaborate [and] hopefully clarify a little bit more what he means," Shapiro said, during a press call Tuesday afternoon. "It's an ongoing investigation. We don't know exactly what happened. Perhaps, [Trump]'s privy to things we are not."

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Pennsylvania and 11 other states have seen more than 100 anti-Semitic incidents this year, according to the JCC Association of North America, including vandalism at Jewish cemeteries and bomb threats against Jewish community centers and schools. The day school two of Shapiro's children attend was recently evacuated due to a threat.

By comparison, FBI data shows 664 anti-Jewish crimes for the entirety of 2015, although the two data points may not represent a one-to-one comparison.

Although several of his Democratic colleagues declined to meet with Trump, Shapiro said he believes his job means working with all authorities.

He did not have an opportunity to ask Sessions any questions.

During that meeting, Shapiro said the U.S. attorney general indicated that he believed the crime rate was rising and that the law enforcement community "need[ed] to go back to what works 20 to 30 years ago."

Certain cities, such as Chicago, have seen increases in violent crime and homicides in recent years. FBI data, however, indicates that violent crime has been decreasing nationwide. The national murder rate also decreased over the same period.

Shapiro said Sessions did not comment specifically about Pennsylvania or other states' medical marijuana laws but the attorney general said his federal counterpart "was pretty strong about the fact that marijuana should not be an alternative to opioid abuse and that it's a gateway . . . he did remind the generals in the audience about his opposition to that."