Former White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham was vilified when she claimed in a 2019 radio interview that aides to former President Barack Obama left mean notes behind for the incoming administration of successor Donald Trump.
On The John Fredericks Show, Grisham said, “When we came into the White House, I’ll tell you something. Every office was filled with Obama books, and we had notes left behind that said ‘You will fail,’ ‘You aren’t going to make it.’ In the press office, there was a big note taped to a door that said that ‘You will fail.'”
Grisham later walked back the claims after denials from WH staffers and Chris Lu, a cabinet secretary in the Obama White House, responded on Twitter. “This is absolutely not true,” Lu tweeted. “Obama repeatedly and publicly praised Bush cooperation during 2009 transition, and pledged we would provide same cooperation to whoever followed us. And that’s what we did.”
“If Grisham is correct,” he wrote, “why has it taken 3 years to come out?”
Well, it may be that Grisham wasn’t telling a complete lie. Comedian Dave Chappelle now claims there were notes left in the White House, but that they were left by celebrities, not members of the Obama team.
“Remember when the Trump administration moved in, they said the Obama staff left dirty notes for us in all the drawers and all the cabinets?” the comedian said. “I saw this happening. I’m not going to say who did it, but it was celebrities writing all this crazy s— and putting them all over there. I saw them doing it, so when I saw that on the news, I laughed real hard.”
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Chappelle made the claims on the YouTube series of supermodel Naomi Campbell, No Filter with Naomi, which she recently filmed at Chappelle’s ranch in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
She launched her web series in April 2020 amid the pandemic and has since interviewed dozens of her celebrity friends. Her channel has nearly a half-million subscribers.
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