Sarah Huckabee Sanders has a legacy of lying to such a degree it’s become a farce.
Credibility from the press podium has spent the better part of her term falling to 30 percent approval rating, lower than even her boss. According to YouGov surveys, her approval rating among the Millennial Generation is an embarrassing 21 percent.
The survey doesn’t breakdown trustworthiness, but throughout 2018, Huckabee Sanders’ lies from the podium couldn’t have helped with respectability. As we close out the year and the White House career of the staffer Stephen Colbert likes calling HuckaSand, these are the most egregious lies from her podium.
1. Family Separation lies.
During her third daily press briefing in June, Sanders sparred with the press over the children being pulled from their families when they tried to enter the United States and declare asylum. The policy has “been on the books for over a decade,” Sanders said. It hasn’t. The “policy” was enacted as a result of President Donald Trump’s “no-tolerance policy” he wrote into an executive order.
“These people have nothing. They come to the border with nothing, and they throw children in cages,” reporter Brian Karem said to Sanders. “You’re a parent; you’re a parent of young children. Don’t you have any empathy for what they go through?”
Sanders told Karem to “settle down” and accused him of wanted to get on camera.
“Credibility issues are just getting more obvious, and reporters are getting really frustrated with it, and it’s causing tension,” a White House reporter told Politico. “It’s sort of coming to a head. The statements are more disprovable, more obvious.”
2. The attack on reporters and Jim Acosta.
The press secretary proved she was nothing more than a mouthpiece for the president’s propaganda when she told reporters this year that Trump was “joking” when encourages assault against reporters or calls them the enemy of the people.
This year, the war against the media accelerated to a whole new level when Sanders accused White House correspondent Jim Acosta of assaulting an intern. She banned Acosta from the White House saying he was “placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern.” She called the behavior “absolutely unacceptable.”
Sanders then circulated a doctored video from InfoWars that made it appear as though Acosta was responsible for the interaction. A slow-motion video of the encounter, showed the real story, however. A lawsuit reinstated Acosta’s credentials, and the White House authored “rules” for the press room instead of arbitrarily telling reporters they were breaking rules that no one was told about.
3. The Rob Porter debacle:
In February, Sanders advocated for White House senior aide Rob Porter after two ex-wives alleged he physically abused them. They gave detailed information to the FBI, and it caused extensive problems for Porter’s clearance applications. Sanders said he was “effective in his role” and had “highest integrity and exemplary character.”
“The president supports victims of domestic violence and believes everyone should be treated fairly and with due process,” she later said
She was quick to support Porter without learning the facts and ultimately ended up embarrassing the White House as more and more details came out about the facts.
Porter was forced to resign. The Chicago Tribune authored an op-ed saying Sanders has lost all credibility.
4. Trump has done way more for African-Americans than President Barack Obama ever did.
In August, Sanders dared to declare, “President Trump in his first year and a half has already tripled what President Obama did (for African-American employment) in eight years.”
For reasons passing in understanding, the president is obsessed with garnering support from the black community. It hasn’t worked.
“This president, since he took office, in the year and a half he’s been here, has created 700,000 new jobs for African-Americans. … When President Obama left, after eight years in office — eight years in office — he had only created 195,000 jobs for African-Americans. President Trump in his first year and a half has already tripled what President Obama did in eight years,” she claimed.
PolitiFact called the claim outright false, citing actual facts and not alternative ones.
5. Trump has never encouraged violence like the MAGA bomber against reporters.
In June, CBS reporter Mitchell Garrett asked Sanders about the president’s war against MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough. That war expanded to attacking reporters like Urban Radio’s April Ryan, Jim Acosta and others.
But in October, Trump supporter Cesar Sayoc sent bombs to several of the president’s foes. After police found his van covered in Trump stickers, he ultimately became known as the MAGA Bomber.
Sanders told reporters that Trump is “certainly not responsible for sending suspicious packages to someone, no more than Bernie Sanders was responsible for a supporter of his shooting up a Republican baseball field practice last year.”
The problem is that Sen. Sanders never advocated violence against Republicans. Trump eggs on his supporters to attack the media, reporters and several Democrats.
6. The president did not know about the payments to Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougal.
“I’ve had conversations with the president about this,” Sanders told the New York Timesin March. “There was no knowledge of any payments from the president, and he has denied all these allegations.”
Oh, how things have changed. Michael Cohen was sentenced with three years in prison for his role in the cover-up of the affairs Trump had with both women. Trump is on tape authorizing the decision by Cohen to create a shell company so he can funnel money before the election and hide the affairs.
One moment that sums up Sanders career for Trump came from Washington Post reporter Josh Dawsey, who point-blank asked Sanders why anyone should trust anything she says given her lies. A flustered Sanders said she wouldn’t respond to questions about the president’s “outside counsel.”
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