White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders repeatedly defended her credibility at a briefing with reporters on Tuesday, even as she was pressed on an apparently false statement she gave months ago.
“I’m an honest person,” Sanders said as she repeatedly declined to explain her assertion in August that President Donald Trump did not dictate a letter about a meeting Donald Trump Jr. had with a Kremlin-connected lawyer offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. The letter falsely stated that the meeting was focused on adoption issues. Trump’s lawyers recently stated in a letter to special counsel Robert Mueller’s team that Trump himself dictated the misleading letter.
Sanders deployed a dodge she frequently uses at the podium, asserting that she works “every day” to provide the best information she can.
And she quickly turned her ire toward the press.
"Frankly, I think my credibility is probably higher than the media’s," Sanders stated later in the briefing. "I think in large part that’s because a lot of you guys spend more of your time focused on attacking the president than reporting the news. I think that if you spent a little bit more of your time reporting the news than trying to tear me down you might actually see that we’re working hard to provide you good information."
Sanders is not the first White House official to struggle with delivering accurate information on behalf of Trump. Former press secretary Sean Spicer also dealt with the issue of delivering or defending information that later proved false. Trump himself acknowledged that his spokespeople will not always be accurate.
“As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!” Trump tweeted in May 2017 after aides asserted that he fired FBI director James Comey because of the deputy attorney general’s recommendation. Trump said soon after that he would have fired Comey regardless of the recommendation.
The original story can be found here.
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