What to do about Sarah Sanders? White House reporters have a few ideas.
Reporters have long approached White House press secretary Sarah Sanders with a trust-but-verify attitude, knowing full well that Sanders is tasked with spinning some of the more unspinnable statements made by her boss, President Trump.
But with the publication of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report on Thursday, Sanders’ credibility among the people who cover her has been stretched about as taut as a violin string.
One White House reporter, April Ryan, has openly called for Sanders to be fired. While others don’t go that far, they acknowledge that Sanders’ public statements have damaged her, perhaps permanently, as the president’s spokeswoman. In conversations with reporters, it’s not unusual to hear her compared unfavorably to Ron Ziegler, President Nixon’s press secretary, whose reputation was shredded by the Watergate scandal.
Sanders admitted under oath to Mueller’s investigators that she made a series of false statements to the press after Trump fired FBI director James B. Comey in May 2017. Sanders told Mueller that her comment that “countless” FBI employees had told her they supported the president’s decision was “a slip of the tongue.” She also said a second utterance — in which she said asserted that Trump and “the rest of the FBI” had lost confidence in Comey — was made “in the heat of the moment.” Mueller’s report concluded that her comments were “not founded on anything.”
Given that she made the erroneous statements on two separate occasions, her explanations for them raised the possibility that she not only lied, but lied in explaining why she lied.
“I hope and trust that she understands why this is a big deal and why it matters to us and to her,” said Peter Baker, the veteran New York Times White House reporter, in an interview Monday. “A press secretary’s most important asset is credibility. If you don’t have that, there’s not much point. But we all make mistakes. The test is what you do about it to make things better.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/what-to-do-about-sarah-sanders-white-house-reporters-have-a-few-ideas/ar-BBWbHuR?li=BBnb7Kz
What else do you expect from an administration with very little credibility?
= new reply since forum marked as read
especially when they need to cover up for another lie.
