GOP. Maine Gov. LePage: Is Sad That NY Drug Dealers 'Impregnate' Maine's Young, White Girls...

LePage: I Never Said 'Black' Drug Dealers Knock Up Maine's White Girls!

Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) said during a Friday morning news conference that he never mentioned race when he said New York City heroin dealers often "impregnate" white women in his state.

LePage said at one of his regular town hall meetings on Thursday that "guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie" and "Shifty" who sell heroin in Maine often "impregnate a young, white girl before they leave."

In Friday's news conference, he said that he didn't know the race of "D-Money" and other offenders.

“I get a report, and they’re saying his street name ‘D-Money,’ street name ‘Smoothie.’ I don’t know where they’re from,” LePage said. “I know where they’re from, I don’t know if they’re white, black, Asian, I don’t know.”

"If you want to make it racist, go right ahead and do what you want," he added.

LePage said reporters must "get your heads out of the sands" and accused them of being in the "back pockets of Maine bloggers." His original comments were reported by a blog that LePage called adversarial and were later picked up by the state's largest newspaper, the Portland Press Herald.

LePage opened the news conference by paraphrasing the iconic movie character Rocky Balboa. He then said he wouldn't apologize, instead offering that "my brain was slower than my mouth."

"Instead of 'Maine women,' I said 'white women' and I'm not going to apologize to the Maine women for that because if you go to Maine, you’ll see that we’re essentially 95 percent white," he said.

Later in the conference, he briefly changed his tune. "So if I slipped up and used the wrong word, I apologize to Maine women," he said.

LePage: Yeah, I Was Talking About Black Drug Dealers The Whole Time!

LePage said his comments were justified in order to draw attention to the problem.

"I had to go scream at the top of my lungs about black dealers coming in and doing the things that they’re doing to our state," LePage told WVOM. "I had to scream about guillotines and those types of things before they were embarrassed into giving us a handful of DEA agents. So this is what it takes with this 127th (state legislature)."

"It takes outrageous comments and outrageous actions to get them off the dime," he added.

In early January, LePage said drug dealers named "D-Money, Smoothie" and "Shifty" travel to Maine and "they sell their heroin, they go back home."

Then, he added: "Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road.”

The backlash to the racially charged remarks was immediate. LePage initially had blamed the media for making his comments sound racially charged. "If you want to make it racist, go right ahead and do what you want," he said at a press conference last month.