Comedian Dave Chappelle hinted that he knows who is behind a bunch of mocking notes that were allegedly left for the incoming Trump administration after the team of his predecessor, Barack Obama, left office.
“I saw this happening. I’m not going to say who did it,” Chapelle said during a Tuesday episode of Naomi Campbell’s “No Filter” YouTube series. “But it was celebrities, writing all this crazy s**t and putting them all over there. I saw them doing it, so when I saw it on the news, I laughed real hard.”
According to Chappelle, the notes were left in White House drawers and cabinets after a star-studded event that the Obama administration held before departing in January 2017.
The story about mysterious taunting notes saying "You will fail" and "You aren't going to make it" awaiting the Trump administration after its predecessors emerged in 2019, when former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham claimed that the departing team left behind nasty messages.
“We came into the White House. I’ll tell you something, every office was filled with Obama books and we had notes left behind that said ‘you will fail,’ ‘you aren’t going to make it,’” Grisham said back in November 2019.
Cited by the New York Post, other sources said at the time that "there were mean notes left in odd places [...] all about how we were doomed to failure".
“Those notes definitely happened. They even left us Russian vodka in the cabinet", another unidentified source claimed at the time, according to the outlet.
The claims caused an uproar among Obama aides, with the president's national security adviser, Susan Rice, slamming the allegations as a "bald faced lie". Obama's speechwriter, Cody Keenan, tweeted that he personally left a phone charger at the White House, but “nobody left unimaginative notes written at a sixth-grade level". Another speechwriter for Obama, Jon Favreau, also refuted the claims.
After the backlash from the Obama team, Grisham clarified that she was talking exclusively about "our experience in the lower press office".
“I don’t know why everyone is so sensitive. At the time we saw it as kind of a prank, and something that always happened. We were so busy trying to learn where the bathrooms were and how to turn on the lights, it wasn’t that big of a deal", she said.