The day after the Mueller report revealed that she’d blatantly lied about the firing of James Comey, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was out lying about her earlier lies. According to the report, Sanders told investigators that it was a “slip of the tongue” when she claimed that “we've heard from countless members of the FBI” who did not support Comey, and a similar comment made in another interview was “a comment she made ‘in the heat of the moment’ that was not founded on anything.”
The “slip of the tongue” and “heat of the moment” claims were excuses for lies, and these were lies Sanders told repeatedly. Now she’s back at it.
”Actually, if you look at what I said, I said the 'slip of the tongue' was in using the word 'countless,' but there were a number of FBI, both former and current, that agreed with the president's decision,” Sanders said on ABC News on Friday, in unusually loud, stressed tones. But even that is just a lie: “countless” slipped off Sanders’s tongue twice in the same press briefing and returned to the claim the next day. Confronted with that, Sanders continued to attack Comey as a “disgraced leaker” loathed by the FBI’s rank and file. Which she had admitted to the Mueller investigators was not true.
And “countless” is the meat of the claim. It’s not newsworthy if there are a small handful of FBI employees who don’t like their boss. It’s newsworthy if there are “countless” ones and “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director.” So the “slip of the tongue” that wasn’t really a slip was what gave her statement power—or would have, if it hadn’t been an obvious lie from the start.
This is Sarah Huckabee Sanders, though. She’s not some piker who’s going to back off her talking points just because we have it in writing that, when she’s facing criminal penalties for lies, she tells a completely different story. “It was the heat of the moment,” she said. “Meaning that it wasn’t a scripted talking point. I’m sorry that I wasn’t a robot like the Democrat Party … they were the ones that were creating the greatest scandal in the history of our country.” This is what she’s saying about something that obviously was a scripted talking point—or at least one that, once it slipped off her tongue, she liked enough to repeat it time and time again. It wasn’t a talking point, she says, having said it repeatedly in 2017 and defending it now. And then she pivots and attacks—attacks Comey, attacks Democrats, attacks the investigation. Most of all, Sanders continues to attack the truth, sticking to the White House talking points attempting to spin the Mueller report as exonerating Donald Trump when it does nothing of the sort.
Shameless liars tend to lie shamelessly. That’s what we’ve got here.
