Authors Stephen King and Don Winslow offer to donate $175,000 to St. Jude's Children's Hospital if Stephanie Grisham gives a 1-hour White House press briefing
- The authors Stephen King and Don Winslow are offering to donate $175,000 to St. Jude's Children's Hospital if White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham holds a one-hour briefing that's open to the entire White House press corps.
- CNN's Jake Tapper asked Grisham about the offer, and she responded, "If you have $200,000 to play with, why not just help children because it's a good thing to do? Donations to charity should never come with strings attached."
- Grisham was promoted to press secretary last year following Sarah Huckabee Sanders' departure from the role.
- Thursday marks 304 days since Grisham took on the position, and she has yet to hold a single briefing, though she frequently appears on the Trump-friendly Fox News to lambaste the president's critics.
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The authors Stephen King and Don Winslow are offering to donate $175,000 to St. Jude's Children's Hospital if White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham gives a one-hour briefing to the entire White House press corps.
"To @PressSec Stephanie Grisham," Winslow wrote on Twitter. "I'm upping my offer to $100,000. @StephenKing has agreed to put in $75,000. We will donate $175,000 to @StJude in your name & help a lot of kids if you will take questions from the full White House press corps for 1 HOUR in the WH briefing room."
CNN's Jake Tapper asked Grisham about the offer, and she responded, "If you have $200,000 to play with, why not just help children because it's a good thing to do? Donations to charity should never come with strings attached."
Grisham previously served as First Lady Melania Trump's spokesperson before being promoted to White House press secretary following Sarah Huckabee Sanders' departure last year.
Thursday marks 304 days since Grisham took on her new role, and she has not yet held a single press briefing.
She does, however, frequently take to the airwaves of Fox News, the right-leaning and Trump-friendly cable news network spearheaded by the conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Most recently, she made an appearance on the network to criticize Americans who are questioning the Trump administration's claim that there was robust intelligence supporting President Donald Trump's decision last week to order an airstrike that killed Iran's Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
"I know a lot of people are now questioning the intel, that's really unfortunate," Grisham said on the network.
"A lot of people are saying [about the strike], 'To what benefit?'" she added. "I would answer that question: the benfit is to that we saved American lives, saved members of the military, we saved diplomats, and a lot of families from having to welcome their loved ones home in coffins."
Grisham's criticisms of Americans distrusting the intelligence community were notable, given Trump's own history of refusing to believe US intelligence findings.
This week, the administration came under deeper scrutiny following a Senate briefing on the strike that several lawmakers - Republican and Democratic - sharply criticized for providing little, if any, evidence to support Trump's decision.
Some Democratic lawmakers have suggested that Trump ordered the drone strike in order to distract from Congress' impeachment proceedings against him, which relate to his attempts to force Ukraine to give him political dirt against a 2020 rival while withholding vital military aid and a White House meeting.
On Thursday, a new Ipsos/USA Today poll showed that nearly half of Americans believe Trump ordered the killing of Soleimani in an attempt to divert the focus from his impeachment.