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Over a digressive 13 minutes, Mr. Trump insisted that he had not been seeking publicity on Monday when he posed for photographs in a heavily restricted area of the cemetery where veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are buried. He accused the news media of stoking the controversy and said baselessly that his political opponents had manufactured it.
Accusing President Biden of being responsible for the deaths of the service members whose graves Mr. Trump was visiting, the former president said at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., “They tell me that I used their graves for public relations services, and I didn’t.”
He said conspiratorially at one point, “That was all put out by the White House.”
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“We’re there, and they said a prayer,” he said at the rally in Johnstown. “Different graves, one here, one there. And they said to me — you know, I’m not surprised, I’d never even thought about — ‘Sir, would it be possible for you to have a picture with us, on the, by the tombstone of my son?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’”
Mr. Trump insisted he had not taken the photos for the publicity. But earlier in the week, his campaign posted photos and footage from the visit on social media. A spokesman for the campaign also insisted that it had received permission to have a photographer at the gravesite, a notion the cemetery rejected in statements.
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Mr. Trump said twice in his Pennsylvania speech that his advisers had suggested he should not bring up the cemetery dispute. But he said that he felt compelled to give his account, a shorter version of which he had shared on Thursday, to rebut reports in the mainstream news media.
“I said, ‘I think I have to talk about it now.’ My people said, ‘Don’t do it, sir, don’t do it,’” Mr. Trump told the crowd. “But if I don’t tell you the story, you’re going to read — it was the front page of The Washington Post.” …”
At two events on Friday, the former president insisted that he had not been seeking publicity at the military cemetery on Monday and defended his campaign’s actions.
www.nytimes.com