Chris Cuomo to Kellyanne Conway on Mollie Tibbetts: 'You're hijacking grief'

On Chris Cuomo Prime Time on Thursday night, Chris Cuomo got into it with White House counselor Kellyanne Conway about, among other things, the Trump administration’s response to University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts’s alleged murder by an undocumented immigrant. President Trump seemed to take advantage of the tragedy to promote his anti-immigration policies at a West Virginia rally Tuesday night. After mentioning Tibbetts briefly, Trump said, “We’ve had a huge impact, but the laws are so bad. The immigration laws are such a disgrace, we’re getting them changed.”

When Conway said of Tibbetts, “God rest her soul,” Cuomo responded, “God rest her soul? You’re not letting her soul rest. You’re waving her like a flag.” He then accused the administration of “hijacking grief,” and he had a point. On Wednesday, the White House sent out a tweet that included the sentence, “The Tibbetts family has been permanently separated” — an obvious allusion to the outrage over the administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the border.

Cuomo also took issue with that: “Is that the time to play ugly politics, because he’s upset about what happened with him putting kids in cages? Permanently separated?”

The anchor isn’t the only one angry about many others, not just those in the administration, using Tibbetts’s murder to promote anti-immigration views. Several of her relatives have posted on social media against doing that. Tibbetts’s aunt reminded those who need reminding that “evil comes in every color” and a second cousin has tweeted about it many times, partly because she’s had to deal with those who ignore the fact that she has just lost a loved one and instead focus on the suspect.

To those emphasizing the race and legal status of the alleged killer, Cuomo said, “Over 17,000 murders in this country in 2016. How many times has he [Trump] stood up and said, ‘This is an atrocity, what happened?’ Only when the people who killed them are someone he wants to target.”

Cuomo Prime Time airs weeknights at 9 on CNN.

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