Kerry Lies, France Swears to It
John Kerry has been saying for a while that he met with “the UN entire security council” prior to the vote on resolution 1441 which found Saddam in material breach and authorized serious consequences. But several security council members have no recollection of the meeting of the group.
France though jumped to Kerry’s aid: Jean-David Levitte, then France’s chief U.N. representative and now his country’s ambassador to the United States, said through a spokeswoman that Mr. Kerry did not have a single group meeting as the senator has described, but rather several one-on-one or small-group encounters. Ah but that’s just a nuance, a minor mistatement, with no bearing on Kerry’s honesty.
WTimes: When reached for comment last week, an official with the Kerry campaign stood by the candidate’s previous claims that he had met with the entire Security Council.But after being told late yesterday of the results of The Times investigation, the Kerry campaign issued a statement that read in part, “It was a closed meeting and a private discussion.”
The statement did not repeat Mr. Kerry’s claims of a lengthy meeting with the entire 15-member Security Council, instead saying the candidate “met with a group of representatives of countries sitting on the Security Council.” (Is that a flip flop or revisionism?)
Asked whether the international body had any records of Mr. Kerry sitting down with the whole council, a U.N. spokesman said that “our office does not have any record of this meeting.”
Somehow or another though this mystery meeting is SEARED in Kerry’s memory and has been repeated cited by him.
At the second presidential debate earlier this month, Mr. Kerry said: “This president hasn’t listened. I went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them, to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable,” Mr. Kerry said of the Iraqi dictator.Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in December 2003, Mr. Kerry explained that he understood the “real readiness” of the United Nations to “take this seriously” because he met “with the entire Security Council, and we spent a couple of hours talking about what they saw as the path to a united front in order to be able to deal with Saddam Hussein.”
Kerry lying? for political gain? He probably just got confused, like he was confused about spending Christmas in Cambodia (which he testified to in his congressional testimony in 1971 and later from the Senate floor and in several interviews) when he was really fifty miles away. In this case he was probably around the corner from the UN buying a hotdog and discussed it with the vendor. More at INDC.
Best Snarky Remark: Doug: But does he keep a magic sock from Kofi Annan in his briefcase?
