'No record': French officials say Kristi Noem lied about cancelling meeting with Macron

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem this week faces continued scrutiny over apparent lies in her autobiography No Going Back, after the French government on Saturday contested her claim that she “decided to cancel” a meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron.

As the Guardian reports, “officials at the Élysée Palace in Paris are questioning a passage that describes a cancelled meeting with the French president.” The statement from French officials comes just days after Noem was forced to remove a passage in her book in which she claimed she met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Noem's latest book controversy centers on her claim that she was “slated to meet with French president Emmanuel Macron,” but cancelled because “the day before we were to meet, he made what I considered a very pro-Hamas and anti-Israel comment to the press.”

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NBC News reports that “a representative from the Élysée Palace disputed Noem's account, saying there’s no record of a scheduled meeting, nor was there an invitation extended to her.”

Despite the palace’s statement, Noem’s Chief of Communications Ian Fury, insisted “the Governor was invited to sit in President Macron’s box for the Armistice Day Parade at Arc de Triomphe.”

“Following his anti-Israel comments, she chose to cancel,” Fury said in a statement to NBC News.

Last Sunday, CBS Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan pressed Noem on the passage that suggested she'd met North Korea’s Kim.

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Though the South Dakota governor refused to “talk about [her] specific meetings with work leaders,” she admitted, “this anecdote shouldn't have been in the book.”

“And as soon as it was brought to my attention, I made sure that that was adjusted,” Noem insisted.

As the Hill reported last week, "Center Street, the publisher for Noem and other conservative politicians, said Sunday it will remove the passage about Kim from reprints of the book, No Going Back, at the request of the governor.”

Noem has also faced criticism for an anecdote she told in her book about shooting a 14-month-old wire-haired pointer named Cricket, which Politico reports sparked “a round of obituaries” for Noem’s political future. Of note, the dog-killing anecdote was originally nixed by Noem’s published team during the draft process of her first memoir Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland.

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Per Politico:

Noem wanted the story in because it showed a decisive person who was unwilling to be bound by namby-pamby niceties, while others on the team — which included agents, editors and publicists at Hachette Book Group’s prestige Twelve imprint, and a ghostwriter — saw it as a bad-taste anecdote that would hurt her brand. The tale was ultimately cut, according to two people involved with the project.

Though Noem was previously thought to be on former President Donald Trump’s vice presidential short list, insiders say the Cricket story likely shot her chances of being Trump's VP pick.

“She’s just done,” one Republican senator who “stays in touch with Trump” told the Hill. “Too much drama.”

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