By Kanishka Singh and Gabriella Borter

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House rebuked former President Donald Trump on Thursday for his association with far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who accompanied the Republican presidential candidate this week.

Loomer says she doesn’t work for Trump, but she has mentioned that she speaks with him about political matters and frequently visits his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida. Her inflammatory posts on X, where she has 1.2 million followers, have at times seemed to provide fodder for Trump’s next lines of attack.

Before Trump’s debate with Democratic Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris on Tuesday, Loomer said that if Harris, who is of Indian descent, wins the Nov. 5 election, “the White House would smell like curry and the White House speeches would be delivered through a call center.”

“These kinds of comments are abhorrent, it is un-American to say such things, exactly the kind of hateful and divisive rhetoric we should condemn,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said on Thursday.

“No leader should ever work with someone who spreads this kind of ugliness, this racist poison,” Jean-Pierre said.

According to video and photo footage, Loomer flew with Trump to Pennsylvania for his debate on Tuesday and was with him and his team in New York on Wednesday for a memorial service for the Al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001.

Loomer had previously suggested that the Sept. 11 attacks were an inside job, sharing a video on Twitter last year that promoted the conspiracy theory. She has since changed her position, saying in an interview with CNN published Thursday that the attacks were carried out by “Islamic terrorists.”

When asked about White House criticism of his ties to Loomer, Trump’s campaign did not directly address the relationship but said he was seeking bipartisan unity at Wednesday’s ceremony commemorating the Sept. 11 attacks.

In an online post, Loomer refuted the White House criticism, denying that she is a racist and suggesting that Jean-Pierre, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, raised her criticism because she did not like Loomer’s social media post on Thursday that falsely claimed Haitian immigrants eat pets.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh, Gabriella Borter, Alexandra Ulmer and Helen Coster, editing by Ross Colvin and Howard Goller)