'The facts are not your friend': CNN's Chris Cuomo has lengthy battle with top Trump aide over travel ban tweets

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June 5, 2017 4:23 PM

Trump's aides hit the airwaves after the president's latest tweetstorm about his controversial travel ban.

Sebastian Gorka.

White House aide Sebastian Gorka, had a heated exchange with CNN host Chris Cuomo on Monday over President Donald Trump's latest tweetstorm about his controversial travel ban.

"Your order is about Muslims. About targeting Muslims and keeping them out and allowing those who are not Muslim a carve-out to come in," he added.

Cuomo was referring to the original travel ban, which banned most refugees from those countries but made an exception for some Christian refugees. That stipulation was dropped in the second executive order after Trump faced backlash for what critics said was religious discrimination.

Gorka said that Indonesia and Egypt were respectively the largest Muslim and Arab nations, and that if Trump's executive order were targeting Muslims, travelers from those countries would have been included.

Why would they "not be included in the executive order? Explain that logic to me, because this is where your spin fails, this is where the fake news propaganda collapses," Gorka told Cuomo.

"If we had some dark ... motive, those are the two first nations you would put on the list, not the seven nations the Obama White House identified" as the greatest concern, "so please answer that question," Gorka continued.

Cuomo said that instead of focusing on who wasn't included in the travel ban, it was important, "for legal and policy purposes," to examine who was included. "And those countries are all Muslim-majority, you did a carve-out for non-Muslims, and that's why it got struck down originally," Cuomo said.

Cuomo later said that Trump confirmed the executive order was a ban, and that "he likes that it's a ban, he likes the original ban, and that's what he wants everybody to know. Why play the games?"

"There are no games. The president can call it whatever he likes," Gorka said, because Trump "has the constitutional authority" to make policies regarding immigration and national security.

"If he wants to call it a ban, he's the president, he's the chief officer of this administration, and he has every right to do that," Gorka said.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway also suggested Monday that the media covers too much of Trump's tweets.

"But, you know, this obsession with covering everything he says on Twitter and very little of what he does as president —" Conway said on the "TODAY Show."

"Well, but that's his preferred method of communication with the American people," host Craig Melvin said in response.

"That's not true," Conway said.

"Well, he hasn't given an interview in over three weeks. So lately, it has been his preferred method," Melvin said.

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