After admitting to having displayed a false tweet on Monday, President López Obrador dismissed the misrepresented journalist’s objections, declaring that while the message may not have been written by him, it still represented what he believed.
López Obrador showed the tweet at his morning news conference, alleging that it was written by journalist Carlos Loret de Mola, with whom he has had a long running dispute.
The false tweet, dated June 17, 2018, predicted the devaluation of the peso under President López Obrador.
Loret quickly called out López Obrador, accusing him of slander and of “lying again” by exhibiting the tweet, which he has repeatedly denied was written by him.
The president conceded his error on Tuesday. “Yesterday I was talking about Loret de Mola predicting that the dollar would be at 35 pesos. He clarified that [the tweet] is fictitious,” he said.
However, he then insisted that while the words weren’t written by Loret, they still represented his beliefs. “It may be fictitious but it’s the closest thing to his way of thinking,” he said.
The president added that showing the tweet was justified because he’d previously heard Loret say something similar. “I was there to hear him, and I have the recording … his comment implied that the dollar was going to go through the clouds,” he said.
The tweet is the latest confrontation between the two. The spat intensified in January after Loret collaborated in an investigation into the president’s son, José Ramón López Beltrán, which alleged that there was an element of corruption in his U.S. property arrangements.
Since the report appeared, the president has directed a barrage of criticism at Loret, including near daily demands that he reveal his wealth and salary. In February, the president exposed what he claimed to be Loret’s hefty salary while a March report by news site Contralínea detailed a large property portfolio held by Loret’s family.
With reports from El Universal
