That tough talk aside, Noem apparently is not immune to such posing: It has now also emerged that she falsely claimed in her book to have met North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. And she refused to cop to the embarasssing mistake directly when CBS host Margaret Brennan questioned her about it on Sunday. The passage in question, which appears to have first been reported by independent South Dakota news site The Dakota Scout , says Noem met the dictator while serving in Congress on the House Armed Services Committee. According to the New York Time s, which obtained an advanced copy of Noem's book, the governor wrote:
When questioned about the anecdote, Noem's spokesperson admitted to The Dakota Scout that the publisher will be updating the book to address ⁘conflated world leaders' names⁘ before its release—though the spokesperson does not appear to have clarified who Noem could have been referring to. (The spokesperson did not respond to questions from Mother Jones on Sunday afternoon.) Noem, too, refused to clear things up when Brennan confronted her on air.
Noem went on to repeat the claim that she has met with ⁘many, many world leaders⁘ before insisting she was ⁘not going to talk about my specific meetings with world leaders, I'm just not going to do that.⁘
