Karoline Leavitt seemed unusually defensive in discussing Alex Pretti’s killing – and refused to endorse Stephen Miller
What Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, did not say on Monday was more important than what she did.
When Leavitt stepped up to the briefing room podium to address the deadly shooting of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, she avoided the kind of victim-blaming tirade that has become de rigueur for Donald Trump’s administration.
Instead the spokeswoman called Pretti’s death a “tragedy”, said the US president wanted to let the investigation take its course, and, strikingly, refused to endorse adviser Stephen Miller’s slander of Pretti as a “would-be assassin”.
Leavitt also spoke of a “constructive and productive conversation” between Trump and the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, and potential withdrawal of border patrol agents from the state. Walz’s office confirmed that the president “agreed to look into” reducing the number of federal agents there.
