You can almost imagine the reality-show excitement that surely went into the ill-considered plan to introduce Anne Sacoolas, the American diplomatic wife who killed 19-year-old motorcyclist Harry Dunn when she drove down the wrong side of an English lane in August, to Dunn's grieving parents. Sacoolas left the U.K. in early September under diplomatic-immunity protections and has not been seen in public since.
The Dunn family, now in the United States to drum up support to send Sacoolas back to the U.K. to face justice, had accepted an "urgent" invitation by the White House from National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien, to visit Donald Trump in Washington, D.C. Trump, it seems, thought he could convince the Dunns to meet the woman who killed their son, and would do so by opening a side door through which she would walk. The whole scene would be captured by a pool of photographers who had been summoned for the meeting.
But the Dunns would have none of it and refused to meet her. Dunn family spokesman Radd Seiger said that the family felt "ambushed" when the "bombshell" was dropped that Sacoolas was next door.
They had envisioned meeting her one day, but as Seiger told The Daily Beast, "only on British soil" and "only with mediators, counselors, and their legal team in tow."
In a statement on the Dunn's Justice4Harry GoFundMe page, Seiger explained what happened. "The family had four surprises yesterday," he wrote. "Firstly, being invited to the White House in the first place which came right out of the blue."
In fact, Dunn's father Tim had suggested on CBS News earlier in the day that he would like to meet the president "man to man, father to father" to plead with him to send Sacoolas back to face justice.
Seiger said the second surprise was that they had not expected to actually meet the president in person. But the third was the doozy.
"Thirdly that Mrs. Sacoolas was present in the building and fourthly that it was the president's intention for Harry's family to meet Mrs. Sacoolas in the Oval Office in front of several photographers in what was obviously designed to be a press call," Seiger wrote in his statement.
The Dunn family blames National Security Adviser O'Brien for the misstep. "It struck us that this meeting was hastily arranged by nincompoops on the run and in particular Mr. O'Brien, who appeared to be extremely uptight and aggressive and did not come across at all well in this meeting which required careful handling and sensitivity," Seiger wrote. "The family remain open to the possibility of meeting Mrs. Sacoolas one day in the future but in a neutral and appropriately controlled environment."
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