SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS HAS SURVIVED DEALING WITH TRUMP’S 3000+ FALSE STATEMENTS

…Press Secretary Sanders has lasted longer than anyone expected.

To lessen her combative position with reporters, Sanders sometime mentions her 3 small children showing that she is a mother.

I have never had much respect for Ms. Sarah Huckabee Sanders since she started into politics.

After graduating from an Arkansas Christian University, Sanders got her start in politics as a field coordinator for her father, Mike Huckabee, in his 2002 re-election campaign for governor of Arkansas. She also worked as a field coordinator for President “Dubya Bush’s” re-election campaign in Ohio in 2004.

Sanders is a founding partner of Second Street Strategies in Little Rock, Arkansas, a general consulting services provider for Republican campaigns.  Sanders was also vice president of another conservative counseling services company, Tsamoutales Strategies. 

Sanders took on the position of National Political Director for her father's failed 2008 presidential campaign.

But Sanders at 35, is not an unsophisticated young woman. She was raised in the wild-and-woolly politics of Arkansas as the only daughter of then former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, and she grew up working on both of his unsuccessful presidential campaigns.

Sanders was also a senior adviser to the GOP’s Tim Pawlenty in his 2012 presidential run. She was involved in the campaigns of both US senators from Arkansas, managing John Boozman's 2010 campaign and served as an adviser to Tom Cotton's 2014 election.

After her father's 2008 campaign, she worked as Executive Director of Huck PAC, a political action committee.  She also was national campaign manager for the ONE CAMPAIGN, an international organization aimed at ending global poverty and preventable diseases.

That all sounds like having a pretty complete political education.  But since she became involved with the Trump operation, her credibility has gone totally down the drain.

On a recent Saturday Night Live (SNL) episode, Sarah was mocked for the fact that her current role as the Press Secretary for our “Liar-In-Chief”, President, demonstrated why she has virtually zero credibility.

People that work with Ms. Huckabee also know that she is not someone that can be lightly ignored.  

She was previously heard all over in the White House when she cursed and yelled at White House Counsel, Donald McGahn, during a direct confrontation. Misleading statements about the domestic abuse scandal that felled staff secretary Rob Porter had dragged the administration into a maelstrom of chaos and contradictory public statements.

The West Wing shouting match was so loud that more than a dozen staffers heard it down the halls.

The exasperated Sanders had yelled at McGahn that she would not continue to speak for the administration unless she was provided more information about Porter’s situation.

The dispute, which initially erupted in a hallway outside Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin’s office, was resolved.  But only after Sanders received the level of explanation that she sought.  However, hours later, Sanders returned to her lectern to field queries from the skeptical press corps.  As what has become the usual situation, her responses left reporters scratching their heads with even more questions.

These are the moments that illustrate the precarious role Sanders has chosen to fill as the public face and voice of the Trump administration.  Because President Trump traffics in so many mis-truths and questionable statements on a daily basis, this has left Ms. Sanders with a plethora of doubts about her credibility in representing the president. 

Sanders was pushed into a very harsh position just over the past week. She was the subject of an serious broadside about her “bunch of lies” by comedian Michelle Wolf at the infamous  White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.   She was then forced to explain her inconsistent accounts from President Trump and his new personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, about the hush money paid to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.

The week was punctuated by an onslaught of commentary about Sanders’s character which became the focus of the SNL program.

The reality is that by the virtue of her position, Sanders is totally bound to the mistruths of the Trump administration, whether she like it or not.

Sanders is a totally willing warrior for Trump, and her critics say she should also be held accountable for all of his utterances.  This includes from the many untruthful, to the racist, to the sexist comments, and there are many of these almost every day.  Since taking office, Trump has made more than 3,000 false or misleading claims.  This is according to an analysis by The Washington Post’s Fact Checkers.  (That number was recently increased to 3,000 from “over 2,000”.)

“When the president blithely lies, it makes all those who are paid to repeat and defend his stories, liars as well,” said David Axelrod, a senior White House adviser under President Barack Obama. “Their credibility is tied to his [Trumps]. It’s a high price to pay for a job, even in the White House.”

By the time Sarah took over as White House press secretary from Sean Spicer in July, the administration’s penchant for misleading the public at the president’s direction was very well established.  We all remember that at his first press briefing, Spicer vigorously misrepresented the size of Trump’s inaugural crowds.  That soared to national fame for all the wrong reasons.

Those in Trump’s orbit argue that the attacks on Sanders have been more vicious than those faced by press secretaries in previous administrations. They argue that in our highly polarized nation, and with the environment nurtured by a president who is at war with what he calls the “Fake News” media, Sanders has become an unwitting target for Trump’s critics.

New trouble for Sanders arose when Trump’s new lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in a freewheeling interview with Sean Hannity, told the friendly Fox News host that Trump had reimbursed his longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, for the $130,000 in hush money he paid to Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.

The payment helped secure Daniel’s silence shortly before the 2016 election about an possible sexual affair with Trump a decade earlier, which the president has of course as usual, denied.

Giuliani’s disclosure is totally at odds with Sanders’s repeated insistence that Trump was not aware of Cohen’s payment to Daniels. The interview with Giuliani, which Sanders did not coordinate, left Sanders in a difficult position.

So when Giuliani’s proclaimed that three American prisoners would soon be released from North Korea, a development the White House had not confirmed, the reporters pressed Sanders: “Was she a liar or simply in the dark?” 

And why was the president’s personal attorney authorized to announce news about such sensitive hostage negotiations?

“I’ve only given the best information I had at the time,” Sanders said in explanation, and this is a line she repeated it six times. “Some information I am aware of, and some I’m not.” 

This is now the classic response from Ms. Sanders for any of her mis-statements.

Sanders said she first learned that Trump had reimbursed Cohen for paying $130,000 to Daniel’s from Giuliani’s TV interview with Hannity. At another point, she repeated her statement that she does not intentionally mislead the public.  However, she admitted that she is not always provided the most accurate or complete information from the president. 

(Yeah think?)

Sanders also offered a general comment about peddling untruths, or as White House advisor Kellyanne Conway has referred to them as, “alternative facts.”  (I still don’t understand how a real “fact”, can have an “alternative”….?

“I would always advise against giving false information,” Sanders has said. “As a person of human decency, I do my best to give the right information.”

(That’s impossible for any press secretary to do for a president that tells so many lies.)

Sanders’ White House supporters say Sarah spends considerable time coming up with the talking points for the president’s wishes.  But it's difficult for Sanders to make his false statements technically truthful....?  If she is guilty of anything, the supporters say, it is providing incomplete information.

I would say it is way more than just offering “incomplete information”, when the Fact Checkers have stated that since Trump took the office, he has offered over 3000 “false-statements” to perhaps other former president’s 60-70 incorrect statements after 1 ½ years in office.

I will say that Sanders has come up with a unique way of removing herself from giving out some of Trump’s untruths.  Sanders will cite the president’s actual statements, but will then refer any and all of the reporter’s questions to his statements to the White House or outside attorneys.

Sanders also continues to dodge questions on hot topics by telling reporters she has not asked the president about it.  This is a deliberate way of avoiding having to deal with those delicate issues of responding to a Trump lie.  This was according to a Sanders confidant.

“Sarah has done a fantastic job of keeping in line with understanding how to effectively communicate what the president’s thoughts are at any given time, recognizing that it is a very dynamic and fluid situation in many cases,” said former Trump press secretary, Sean Spicer. “What she has done is, she has realized, you can’t get in trouble for what you don’t say.”

Last Saturday night, Sanders sat next to Olivier Knox, the chief Washington correspondent for SiriusXM, at the head table for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.  In addition, Sanders did not stand up to congratulate any of the journalists who were presented awards.  This included a team from CNN, which Trump continues to call all of CNN’s reports, “fake news”. And as Wolf Blitzer mocked her, joking that she “burns facts and then uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye,” Sanders just sat there making no expressions.

Later that evening, Sanders and her husband, Bryan, were spotted at the invite-only MSNBC after-party, greeting friends and reporters well after midnight.

It must be noted that President Trump incorrectly refers to both NBC and MSNBC as the worst of the “fake news” networks.  This is just another lie as the serious WAPO Fact Checkers put Trump’s favorite news network, Fox News, as the “Four Pinocchio’s network of fake news”.

Just an example of a normal week at the White House.

Copyright G.Ater  2018