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‘Good Morning America’ catches Ivanka lying about her father okaying lethal force at the border

Trump told reporters he had "given the OK" for lethal force over the weekend.

In an interview with Good Morning America, first daughter and senior adviser to the president Ivanka Trump denied that her father had authorized lethal force at the border. The president had told reporters he had, just days earlier. (PHOTO CREDIT: Cheriss May/Nu Photo via Getty Images)
In an interview with Good Morning America, first daughter and senior adviser to the president Ivanka Trump denied that her father had authorized lethal force at the border. The president had told reporters he had, just days earlier. (PHOTO CREDIT: Cheriss May/Nu Photo via Getty Images)

First daughter and senior adviser to the president Ivanka Trump lied — and then backtracked — about the fact that her father, President Trump, authorized lethal force at the U.S. southern border in an interview with Good Morning America Wednesday.

“I don’t believe that that’s what he said, but his primary role as commander in chief is to protect the nation’s borders,” she said when asked about the authorization, adding that lethal force “is not, I think, something that anyone’s talking about.”

But, as CNN noted Wednesday, just last week, the president said he has, in fact, “given the OK” to use lethal force on the border, though he said he hopes “they don’t have to” use it.

Pressed about this during her GMA interview, Ivanka Trump said, “So lethal force, under any circumstance, would be the last resort. But he is the commander in chief of the armed forces of this country, so he always has to be able to protect the border…. He’s not talking about innocent asylum seekers.”

“Nobody wants to see anyone get hurt,” she added.

Trump’s GMA interview aired just days after federal authorities tear gassed migrants and asylum seekers attempting to cross the border after being turned away illegally at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. Trump said the images from the incident were “devastating” to her.

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“I think, like any other person with a heart, it’s devastating to see the images and seeing children put at risk. Running towards the border is heartbreaking, there’s no other way to process it. It also makes me angry and makes me angry that we haven’t been able to come together as a nation and change our laws,” she said.

Trump also discussed her use of personal email for government work during the GMA interview and said she believed there was “no equivalency” between her email use and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state, an issue President Trump made central to his 2016 campaign.

“All of my emails that relate to any form of government work, which is mainly scheduling and logistics and managing the fact that I have a home life and work life are all part of the public record,” Trump said. “They’re all stored on the White House system. So everything has been preserved, everything’s been archived. There just is no equivalency between the two things.”

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She added, “My emails have not been deleted, nor was there anything of substance, nothing confidential that was within them. So, there’s no connection between the two things… People who want to see it as the same [as Hillary Clinton’s emails] see it as the same.”

Trump also said in the interview that aired Wednesday that she does not believe her father is creating a climate of hatred.

“I reject that. I think that he is creating policy that is going to lift all Americans, and that’s what his number one role is,” she said. “But we need to have this dialogue and sometimes the expression of anger and resistance are the moment before you really start to engage in earnest. And we are looking to do that.”