Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said President Trump did not “lobby” him during an October dinner meeting.
Zuckerberg made the remarks to CBS News’s Gayle King in an interview that aired Monday on “CBS This Morning.”
“We talked about a number of things that were on his mind. And some of the topics that you’d read about in the news around our work,” Zuckerberg told King of the meeting, which was not disclosed by the White House at the time and came as Trump was publicly urging the social media company not to ban political advertising.
“Did he try to lobby you in any way?” King asked during the interview, adding that critics have said “the optics weren’t good.”
“No … I think some of the stuff that people talk about or think gets discussed and these discussions are not really how that works. … I also want to respect that it was a private dinner and … private discussion,” Zuckerberg responded.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), one of Facebook’s most vocal critics in the Senate, denounced the dinner meeting as “corruption” in November.
“Amid antitrust scrutiny, Facebook is going on a charm offensive with Republican lawmakers. And now, Mark Zuckerberg and one of Facebook’s board members—a major Trump donor—had a secret dinner with Trump,” she tweeted after the meeting became public. “This is corruption, plain and simple.”