White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders hit new rhetorical heights in the ongoing Republican campaign to claim that the Mueller report (of which we have seen 98 words so far) exonerates Donald Trump (despite the fact that 17 of those words were “while this report does not conclude the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him”). Sanders put on her best “can you believe this nonsense” tone of bemused outrage to hype up exactly what Democrats were looking for from the Mueller investigation.
Democrats “accused the president, the United States president, of being an agent of a foreign government,” Sanders said. “Take a minute and realize how outrageous and how serious and how malicious an accusation like that is,” says the spokeswoman for someone who ran on a promise to imprison his political opponents for things like improper email security.
“They literally accused the president of the United States of being an agent for a foreign government,” Sanders said, then took a couple of Olympic-caliber rhetorical leaps. “That's equivalent to treason. That is punishable by death in this country.” Did someone call Donald Trump an agent of a foreign country who’d possibly committed treason? Certainly! Was it the dominant claim coming from people calling for investigations? Nope.
Trump, meanwhile, insisted on Monday that the investigation sprang from “a lot of people out there that have done some very, very evil things, very bad things, I would say treasonous things against our country.” He previously accused FBI agent Peter Strzok of “treason.” But, you know, totally outrageous thing to say … or apparently even to ask questions about by calling for an investigation of a campaign’s many questionable ties to the foreign government that interfered in American democracy to get that campaign’s candidate elected president.