The GOP leader who told President Barack Obama "I cannot even stand to look at you" was U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas. Or so says Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
But Sessions immediately denied making the remark and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has also disputed that any such remark was ever made.
"It did not happen," Carney
told reporters Wednesday.
The Huffington Post revealed Sessions' identity as the man who supposedly hurled the insult.
It claimed Reid told a private meeting of his Democratic caucus last week about the derisive comment — which supposedly was uttered during a private meeting between the president and GOP leaders — and then lauded President Obama for his "dignified" reaction.
The barb went viral when Reid's No. 2, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, posted the exchange on Facebook. Durbin did not name the source of the comment.
In the confusing whodunnit, a White House official said Thursday that the administration did in fact relay a message to Reid, but that a "miscommunication" resulted in the misinterpretation, the Huffington Post says.
Two Democratic senators — neither of them Durbin — and two Democratic senate aides were at the meeting where Reid implicated Sessions, according to the Huffington Post.
Reid reportedly told his colleagues that Obama responded graciously to Sessions, saying the president told the Texas representative that he respected their differences.
Reid is known in Washington for occasionally embellishing the truth. Once he accused GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney of failing to pay taxes for 10 years; he also claimed that 8 million jobs were lost during President George W. Bush's administration when there was actually a net gain of 1 million jobs,
according to Factcheck.org.
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