McCain family fires back over attacks on ill senator
Sen. John McCain’s daughter denounced two people Friday who made comments critical of her ailing father this week.
“My father’s legacy is going to be talked about for hundreds and hundreds of years,” the younger McCain said on ABC’s The View, where she is a cohost. “These people? Nothingburgers. Nobody’s gonna remember you.”
The Washington Post and other media outlets reported Thursday that Kelly Sadler, a White House communications official, dismissed McCain’s public opposition to President Donald Trump’s CIA nominee by saying in a staff meeting, “It doesn’t matter, he’s dying anyway.”
The elder McCain, R-Ariz., 81, remains in Arizona, where he is receiving treatment for an aggressive and typically fatal type of brain cancer.
A White House spokesman did not dispute the report and said, “We respect Senator McCain’s service to our nation and he and his family are in our prayers during this difficult time.”
Separately Thursday, retired Air Force Gen. Thomas McInerney said during an appearance on Fox Business Network that torture “worked on John” during McCain’s five and a half years in captivity during the Vietnam War. “That’s why they call him ‘Songbird John,’ ” McInerney said.
On Friday, Meghan McCain addressed Sadler directly: “Kelly, here’s a little news flash — and this may be a bit intense for 11 o’clock in the morning on a Friday — but we’re all dying. I’m dying, you’re dying, we’re all dying. And I want to say that since my dad has been diagnosed in the past — it’s almost a year, July 19th — I really feel like I understand the meaning of life. And it is not how you die. It is how you live. And I always have had something to believe in, and my dad’s all about character and bipartisanship and something greater than yourself and believing in this country and believing in the fact that we as Americans can still come together. And that’s something that I grew up in and feeds me every day.”
She added a rebuke of the Trump White House: “I don’t understand what kind of environment you’re working in when that would be acceptable, and then you can come to work the next day and still have a job.”
Neither Sadler nor McInerney have publicly apologized. Charles Payne, the Fox host who interviewed McInerney, apologized Thursday for not challenging the “Songbird John” claim. Independent accounts of McCain’s time in North Vietnamese captivity do not include any suggestion that he offered any material information to his captors, and McCain says the same. He did, by multiple accounts, refuse offers of early release based on his status as the son of a Navy admiral.
“It’s a really ugly nickname,” Meghan McCain said Friday. “At some point, when you’re tortured, everyone breaks. I realize that is how it works. And that’s how you get false information.”