Trump calls LaVar Ball 'ungrateful fool' in angry morning tweets
President Trump continued his feud with LaVar Ball, the father of a UCLA basketball player, on Wednesday following Ball's downplaying of the president's role in getting his son, LiAngelo Ball, and two other student athletes, released from shoplifting charges in China.
"It wasn't the White House, it wasn't the State Department, it wasn't father LaVar's so-called people on the ground in China that got his son out of a long term prison sentence — IT WAS ME," Trump tweeted, taking full advantage of his 280 characters:
The president added "shoplifting is NOT a little thing," alleging incorrectly that LiAngelo could have spent "the next 5 to 10 years" in jail; Chinese law dictates the crime's maximum term would have been one to two years, with an opportunity for the sentence to be mitigated, The Washington Post reports.
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Ball has claimed that if he were going to thank anyone for releasing his son, it would be Chinese President Xi Jinping. But "I don't have to go around saying thank you to everybody," he told CNN's Chris Cuomo.
Trump, though, sees things differently. For good measure, he retweeted a Twitter user claiming that "if Hillary got my kid out of prison, as much as I hate the woman, I'd thank her corrupt a--!"
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