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Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany blasts CNN for calling affidavits she brandished on Fox News as 'blank'

McEnany's retort came after CNN anchor Brianna Keilar claimed on-air that the documents were 'full of nothing, stacks of papers with information worth less than the paper they are printed on'

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany did not take lightly to a suggestion by CNN that the stack of affidavits McEnany presented on live television as evidence of "election fraud" were actually blank pieces of paper. She clapped back at the news outlet for falsely accusing her of putting up a show on national television. 

The allegation in question stemmed from multiple segments on Fox News where she was shown briefly brandishing pieces of paper to the camera that she claimed were legal documents. During a Tuesday interview on 'Hannity,' McEnany said the papers were affidavits connected to an election dispute in Wayne County, Michigan. Her appearances became more frequent after President Donald Trump baselessly alleged widespread voting fraud and his re-election campaign filed a series of lawsuits in some battleground states which were called in favor of President-elect Joe Biden, ultimately making him the projected winner of the 2020 election. 

McEnany said on Tuesday, November 17, that she took offense to the fact that CNN "did about a 10-minute monologue saying these were blank. They're not blank." "In fact," McEnany continued, "these pages of paper from one county were the reason that you had a county level, Wayne County canvassers say we cannot certify this election because of these witnesses."

Things took a dramatic turn in Wayne County on Tuesday night as their Board of Canvassers certified the results of the presidential election after initially being deadlocked at 2-2 along party lines, which could have delayed the state's process for validating pivotal votes.

McEnany's retort came after CNN anchor Brianna Keilar claimed on-air that McEnany's documents, which were sometimes shown inside three-ring binders, were "full of nothing, stacks of papers with information worth less than the paper they are printed on." "They may be huge," Keilar added, "but they are also empty."

We previously reported that the Trump campaign released affidavits from GOP poll watchers in Detroit, Michigan -- a state called for Biden -- which was supposed to prove evidence of irregularities in the vote-counting process but mostly ended up being a compilation of complaints by a bunch of poll watchers including comments on the kind of attires worn by the volunteers who were hard at work tallying ballots and their body types. 

Reuters reporter for Washington DC, Brad Heath, tweeted out relevant snippets from the humungous pile of affidavits on Twitter in a long thread of posts. "The Trump campaign released that 234-page stack of affidavits from poll watchers in Detroit tonight. So far, it's mostly allegations that they couldn't get as close as they wanted to the counting, couldn't re-enter the room after they left, etc. Pretty standard election stuff," he wrote in one of the tweets.

Another tweet that stood out the most in the thread was: "One Republican poll watcher said city workers were wearing Black Lives Matter apparel, and one of them was large." A photo of one portion of a page of the affidavit, the poll watcher's statement read, "I experienced intimidation by poll workers wearing BLM face masks and another man of intimidating size with a BLM shirt on, very closely following challengers, including myself, even though there was supposed to be social distancing going on."

Heath wrote in one of the tweets. Summarizing the affidavits, he wrote, "You get the gist. Many of these boil down to not being able to observe as closely as they wanted, not having questions answered. A bunch are people saying they saw something but didn't know exactly what was happening or why. Some are relatively detailed; most are not."

The journalist explained, "But they're not alleging fraud. A few allege things that made them suspicious, but they offer very little detail," adding, "But the other think they show is a big counting process involving tons of people. And for these types of allegations to add up to systematic fraud, you'd have to make the jump that a *lot* of people were in on it, rather than being imperfect municipal employees."