Former Calif. Sen. Nate Holden says he flew with Trump during emergency helicopter landing

Aug. 9 (UPI) -- Former Los Angeles city councilman and state Sen. Nate Holden said that he was the one with Trump in a helicopter ride that made an emergency landing and not former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown .

During a press conference Thursday, the 2024 Republican presidential nominee told a story that reflected poorly on his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris , in which he claimed Brown spoke to him negatively about her while they were surviving a close brush with death together during a crash landing in California.

"Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco," Holden, 95, said in an interview with Politico late Friday. "I'm a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles. I guess we all look alike," he added.

During the 1990s he said he was trying with Trump to build on the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, the district that Holden represented at the time, according to Politico.

Holden said he met Trump at Trump Tower, en route to Atlantic City, N.J., where they were going to tour the developer's brand new Taj Mahal casino.

Also aboard was Trump's late brother, Robert, the attorney Harvey Freedman and Barbara Res, Trump's former executive vice president of construction and development. Res wrote about it in her book, All Alone on the 68th Floor .

Res said "the pilot let us know he had lost some instruments and we would need to make an emergency landing," she wrote. "By now, the helicopter was shaking like crazy."

After considerable turbulence, they landed safely in New Jersey at an airport where Trump had his commuter helicopters stored.

"[Trump] has also told the helicopter story before, in his 2023 book, Letters to Trump , in which he published letters to him from a number of people, including Brown.

Holden told a Politico reporter nobody discussed Harris.

Brown and Harris dated briefly in the early 1990s when the Democratic nominee was a prosecutor in Alameda County, Calif. Trump's story came after he was asked about the decades-ago relationship between the pair, which Harris' various political opponents have pointed to over the years as being inappropriate.

"Willie was -- he was a little concerned [about Harris]," Trump said while relating his tale of going "down in a helicopter with him."

"So I know him, but I know him pretty well. I mean, I haven't seen him in years. But he told me terrible things about her."

Trump concluded, "He was not a fan of hers very much, at that point."

Then-Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown accompanied Trump during a trip to survey damage caused by the deadly 2018 California wildfires, The New YorkTimes reported Thursday, indicating the former president either confused the two Browns or fabricated the story.

Meanwhile, current Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom , who also was aboard the helicopter during the 2018 flight, claimed it never made an emergency landing and that none of the passengers onboard were ever in any danger.

"I call complete B.S.," Newsom told the newspaper.

Willie Brown, now 90, told the Times Trump's tale was false, confirming that he had never ridden in a helicopter with the former president, never nearly died in a crash and that he remained an "avid supporter" of Harris.

"You know me well enough to know that if I almost went down in a helicopter with anybody, you would have heard about it!" he said.