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In early February 2018, the untrustworthy website YourNewsWire and a number of other questionable sources posted a report alleging that first lady Melania Trump had demanded that the White House be exorcised to cleanse it of Obama demons before she would set foot in it: The article was based on an interview with evangelical Pastor Paul Begley (who is not, in any sense we could verify, a White House pastor), who told Internet radio host Sheila Zilinsky that a literal exorcism was conducted in the White House between the time the Obamas left the building and the time the Trumps entered it on Inauguration Day 2017: Conservative website CNSNews also repeated Begley's remarks at length, though they took the additional step of quizzing the pastor on his source(s), which he refused to reveal: Far from expressing skepticism about the preacher's claims, however, CNSNews quoted a 2010 Washington Post article about Bill and Hillary Clinton's trips to Haiti to corroborate Begley's assertion that there were all kinds of idol gods and images and all kinds of artifacts in there that were demonic, even some of the stuff from the Clinton era because they were really tied in with the Haitians. What the Post article actually said was: As to the Obamas, we've seen no credible reports to the effect that they kept any sort of demonic artifacts in the White House. In any case, the absurd allegation that a White House exorcism took place was debunked on 10 February by Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for Melania Trump, who told The Associated Press that it was not true in any way.
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