"I can definitively say the president is not a liar": Sarah Huckabee Sanders ignores Comey testimony to defend Trump

Comey says President Trump lied, but Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted in a press briefing that he's not a liar

Published June 8, 2017 4:26PM (EDT)

Sarah Huckabee Sanders (AP/Susan Walsh)
Sarah Huckabee Sanders (AP/Susan Walsh)

In an off-screen press briefing on Thursday the White House deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said that President Trump is not a liar, despite earlier testimony from former FBI Director James Comey in which he said that the president had, in fact, lied.

"I can definitively say the president is not a liar," Sanders said. "It's frankly insulting that the question would be asked."

Comey said during his testimony on Thursday that Trump's claims that the FBI was in disarray and had lost confidence in its own leader, were flat out lies.

Even Trump's own lawyers have previously crafted tactics of talking with the president because he would lie so often.

Of course, there is a way that the president would be able to lay all of this to rest — by testifying under oath.

On Thursday after the hearing by Comey, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., suggested that Trump offers a testimony as well. "If the White House’s account differs from what we heard today, the American people deserve to hear the President’s side of the story in a similar forum – under oath and open to the press," Murphy said in a released statement.

"It’s hard to overstate the impact of Jim Comey’s testimony today. For the first time, under oath and penalty of perjury, the former FBI Director testified that the president repeatedly pressed him for a pledge of loyalty, and asked him to drop the investigation into illegal activity of a White House staffer at the center of the Russia probe. A couple months later, after neither request was fulfilled, Trump fired him," Murphy added. "That confirms that media reports aren’t ‘fake news’ – they’re very real and very concerning."

After the hearing finished Trump's personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz accused Comey of "unauthorized disclosures" of "privileged communications," even though Trump openly disclosed these discussions as well in the letter that he fired Comey with.


By Charlie May

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