Mueller report caught Spicer and Sanders lying

[aubiefifty 16,705]

vox.com

 

7 times the Mueller report caught Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders lying to press

Dara Linddara@vox.com

12-15 minutes

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Donald Trump lies all the time, and his administration officials often end up lying on this behalf.

We know this. We’ve known this since the day after his inauguration, when then-press secretary Sean Spicer gave an angry press conference insisting that Trump had record crowds to watch him get sworn in.

But it’s striking that the Mueller report — in which Spicer and his successor, Sarah Sanders, are peripheral figures at best — still manages to incidentally document at least seven instances of Trump’s press secretaries lying, four of them in the 24 hours after Trump summarily fired FBI Director James Comey on May 9, 2017.

These aren’t all the times that special counsel Robert Mueller’s report proves that Trump administration officials were lying, or even all the times it shows Sanders and Spicer were lying. It is limited to the cases in which the lie is noted in the report, as well as the truth it ended up obscuring.

If the Mueller report is a testimony to just how big the difference is between “unequivocally a crime” and “an okay thing to do” — and arguably it is — having your press people lie routinely and without apparent regret about important things is a pretty representative motif. No one would argue that what Spicer or Sanders are documented doing here is criminally chargeable, but it’s still bad for democracy.

Spicer lied about who made the decision to fire Michael Flynn

As presented in the Mueller report, the decision that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn needed to go — as evidence began to pile up that he’d lied to Trump officials and maybe to the FBI about conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions prior to Trump’s inauguration — was made on February 9, 2017 by then-White House Counsel Don McGahn and then-White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. “McGahn and Priebus concluded that Flynn should be terminated,” the report says, “and recommended that course of action to the President.”

It doesn’t tell us how Trump responded, though Trump did have at least one conversation with Flynn on February 12 that did not involve firing him. When Preibus finally ordered Flynn to resign, the president warmly wished him goodbye: “Priebus recalled that the President hugged Flynn, shook his hand, and said, ‘We’ll give you a good recommendation. You’re a good guy. We’ll take care of you.’”

But Sean Spicer, in a press briefing the next day, portrayed the decision as one that Trump himself made — because he no longer trusted Flynn: “a level of trust between the President and General Flynn had eroded to the point where he felt he had to make a change.”

The report makes clear that this was a lie. Flynn called White House adviser Jared Kushner after the press conference, upset about how Spicer had described the situation. Kushner, in the room with the president, reassured Flynn that Trump respected and cared about him — and promised a positive tweet about Flynn later (with Trump’s assent).

Flynn had every reason to be upset. He knew that the account Spicer had given simply wasn’t true. Trump’s continued defenses of Flynn and efforts to be in touch with him strongly suggested what the Mueller report proves: Spicer and others drafted a post-hoc fiction to absolve Trump of any suspicion about his judgment in hiring Flynn.

Sanders (probably) lied about whether Trump asked Comey for his loyalty

Shortly after Flynn was fired, Trump had a one-on-one dinner with then-FBI Director James Comey. Comey, in a memo he wrote immediately after the dinner and before both the special counsel’s investigators and Congress — in other words, under penalty of perjury —said that Trump told him, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.”

When Comey’s recollection of the dinner became public (in advance of his testimony before a Senate committee in June 2017), Trump denied any such statement, and so did his press team. Sarah Sanders told the New York Times that Trump “would never even suggest the expectation of personal loyalty.”

The Mueller report doesn’t prove that Trump and Sanders were lying about the loyalty request — though it does note that Trump lied about inviting Comey to dinner (Trump claimed Comey asked for the meeting, but the president’s schedule shows he initiated the invitation). But the report makes it clear which account it finds credible: “Comey’s memory of the details of the dinner, including that the President requested loyalty, has remained consistent throughout.”

Furthermore, in a footnote, the report reveals that Trump wasn’t exactly as averse to the idea of asking for loyalty as Sanders portrayed him. It summarizes a private conversation with Sean Spicer: Trump “stated that he had never asked for Comey’s loyalty, but added that if he had asked for loyalty, ‘Who cares?’”

Spicer lied about who decided to fire Comey

In the 24 hours after Comey was abruptly fired as head of the FBI, Spicer and Sanders lied about the circumstances of that firing in four distinct ways.

The first, and most blatant, was Spicer’s initial spin on the firing: that Donald Trump had had no involvement in getting James Comey fired.

Here’s how the Comey firing was planned, according to the Mueller report:

• On May 5, 2017, Trump decided to fire Comey and dictated a letter of dismissal.
• Trump kept revising with Stephen Miller over the weekend (though in every draft, he started the letter by mentioning that Comey told him he wasn’t under investigation).
• On May 8, 2017, Trump met with other senior advisers and presented Comey’s firing as a fait accompli: per the report, Trump “conveyed that the decision had been made and was not up for discussion.”
• McGahn suggested involving then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and deputy Rod Rosenstein, who were already scheduled for a meeting with Trump later that day.
• McGahn and other officials told Sessions and Rosenstein about the plan at noon.
• Trump ordered Rosenstein to draft a memo expressing Rosenstein’s own concerns about Comey — but tried to get the Russia investigation into it.
• Ultimately, the White House team decided that Trump’s original letter would “[n]ot [see the] light of day,” and that the team provide “no other rationales” for firing Comey beyond what Sessions and Rosenstein wrote.

Here’s what Sean Spicer said about the Comey firing to reporters in the infamous “lurking in the bushes” press conference the night Comey was fired:

• “It was all [Rosenstein]. No one from the White House. It was a DOJ decision.”

Sanders lied about when Trump decided to fire James Comey

By the morning of May 10, the White House had abandoned the lie that Trump hadn’t made the decision to fire Comey. But they weren’t yet willing to jettison the post-hoc justification for Comey’s firing that Sessions and Rosenstein provided. In a press conference that day, Sarah Sanders said on multiple occasions that Trump didn’t make his final decision until after receiving Rosenstein’s memo the day before laying out the case against Comey — which focused on Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation in 2016 and didn’t mention the Russia investigation.

It was obvious at the time that Sanders wasn’t telling the truth. One reporter pointed out that Rosenstein’s memo said that Comey had been too harsh on Clinton, while Trump had said Clinton should have been treated more harshly. (Sanders tried to claim that Trump had a different position as a candidate than he did as a president.)

But the Mueller report is pretty definitive that the decision to fire Comey was made before Sessions and Rosenstein were ever informed. It cites five different officials who describe Trump as being certain Comey should be fired as of the meeting on the morning of May 8; White House adviser Stephen Miller told investigators that Trump started the meeting with, “I’m going to read you a letter. Don’t talk me out of this. I’ve made my decision.”

Sanders lied about Sessions and Rosenstein’s involvement in the Comey firing

Buttressing Sanders’s lie about the Comey firing was a lie about why Sessions and Rosenstein had been involved in the process: “They had come to him to express their concerns,” she told the press the next day.

That’s simply not true. Sessions and Rosenstein had both had concerns with Comey, but the report makes it perfectly clear that their involvement in the process was initiated by the White House on Monday morning. “McGahn said previously scheduled meetings with Sessions and Rosenstein that day would be an opportunity to find out what they thought about firing Comey,” the report notes. After McGahn and other advisers held that meeting, they scheduled an Oval Office meeting for Sessions and Rosenstein to discuss Comey with Trump.

What’s especially important to note is that by the time Sanders gave this press conference, Sessions and Rosenstein had already told the White House that they felt they were being used. Sessions told McGahn’s office on Tuesday night that “Rosenstein was upset that his memorandum was being portrayed as the reason for Comey’s termination,” the report says, while Rosenstein told Trump himself that “if the press asked him, he would tell the truth that Comey’s firing was not his idea.” But Sanders went out the next day and portrayed them as advisers who’d brought independent concerns to Trump before Trump made his final decision.

Sanders lied about “countless” FBI agents losing faith in Comey

Of all the lies, this is the one that Sanders herself admitted was a lie to Mueller: the claim, expressed both in the May 10 press conference and in other interviews, that she had heard from “countless” members of the FBI who did not support Comey and were glad he was fired.

This too was a suspicious claim at the time, since contemporaneous reporting portrayed the FBI as being in mourning over Comey’s ouster. But the Mueller report discloses that Sanders didn’t have any backing for the claim at all:

Sanders told this Office that her reference to hearing from “countless members of the FBI” was a “slip of the tongue.” She also recalled that her statement in a separate press interview that rank-and-file FBI agents had lost confidence in Comey was a comment she made ”in the heat of the moment” that was not founded on anything.

Of course, these too appear to be lies — or at least flimsy excuses. Sanders is saying that a statement she made several times just during the May 10 presser was a “slip of the tongue,” and that its use again in a different interview was “in the heat of the moment.” Sanders’s statements to the special counsel’s investigators portray her as someone with too little self-control to be an effective messenger; the much more likely answer is that she was simply lying, and knew it, and kept doing it.

Sanders lied about Trump dictating the statement about the Trump Tower meeting

In July 2017, the Trump administration was contacted by the New York Times about a meeting that Trump campaign officials including Donald Trump Jr. had had with Kremlin-connected lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in the summer of 2016.

Trump worked on a statement with adviser Hope Hicks, in which he worked to portray the meeting as entirely about US adoption law. He knew at the time this wasn’t true; he knew about the email exchange that had preceded the meeting, in which Trump Jr had expressed excitement over the idea of getting dirt on Clinton.

A few days later, though, the emails themselves were public (posted by Trump Jr. on Twitter) and the press was reporting that Trump had worked on the initial statement — a statement which now appeared to be an attempt at misdirection. Here was Sanders’s response:

“After consulting with the President on the issue,” the report says, “White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told the media that the President ‘certainly didn’t dictate’ the statement, but that ‘he weighed in, offered suggestions like any father would do.’“

Trump had, of course, dictated a statement. And his lawyers ultimately admitted as much in a “private communication” to Mueller’s team, saying that “the President dictated a short but accurate response to the New York Times article on behalf of his son, Donald Trump, Jr.”

That isn’t quite true, either — Trump’s suggested statement would not have been accurate, and it was additions by Trump Jr. and Hicks that made it only deeply misleading. But that, too, proves something: that there were people in Trump’s orbit who were capable of mitigating the president’s temptation to lie all the time. Those people just weren’t the ones in charge of talking to the press.

 

blast vox all you want as not being credible this is directly taken from the mueller report.

[SaltyTiger 7,764]

3 hours ago, aubiefifty said:

7 times the Mueller report caught Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders lying to press

So? 

[SaturdayGT 719]

10 hours ago, SaltyTiger said:

So? 

    Because Government officials have long been a pillar of honesty. Lying to the press was unheard of until Trump and these guys took over....

[TexasTiger 12,810]

10 hours ago, SaltyTiger said:

So? 

Salty— no principles, no morals, no ethics. You’ve proven yourself to be even far worse than I thought.

[AuCivilEng1 10,995]

2 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

Salty— no principles, no morals, no ethics. You’ve proven yourself to be even far worse than I thought.

Funny how much moral integrity one is willing to give up in the name of keeping brown people out of the country. The filthiest of the trash. 

[TitanTiger 20,471]

12 hours ago, SaturdayGT said:

Because Government officials have long been a pillar of honesty. Lying to the press was unheard of until Trump and these guys took over....

Shouldn't we still expect or demand honesty though, rather than shrug it off because the liars are on "our" team?

[homersapien 11,353]

3 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

Salty— no principles, no morals, no ethics. You’ve proven yourself to be even far worse than I thought.

Me too.

[homersapien 11,353]

13 hours ago, SaltyTiger said:

So? 

We have people on this forum today who will insist Comey's firing was totally on Rosenstein.

Administration lies make a difference.  They are not good for democracy.

[DKW 86 7,410]

The real problem is The Clinton Problem, which in an odd way the Trumpistas have illustrated. In the 90s we were told as nauseum that morals and ethics did not matter to the America Voter. Now, predictably, that meme has come full circle. The Dems that protected Clinton are outraged when a man with no character for 30 years and a friend of the Clintons is sitting in the WH. The Republicans that hated Clinton so are now the party choosing to look the other way.  Karma is a real comedian and serves crow as the main course. 

[SaltyTiger 7,764]

9 hours ago, homersapien said:

We have people on this forum today who will insist Comey's firing was totally on Rosenstein.

Administration lies make a difference.  They are not good for democracy.

Yeah. President Trump should have fired him his first day in office.

[SaltyTiger 7,764]

14 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

Salty— no principles, no morals, no ethics. You’ve proven yourself to be even far worse than I thought.

Thank you Tex 

 

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

2 hours ago, SaltyTiger said:

Thank you Tex 

 

Coming from Tex and the rest of his puppets, you should feel honored Salty.

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

12 hours ago, homersapien said:

Me too.

Awe, here I’ll fix it.

 

16 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

Salty and Homer— no principles, no morals, no ethics. You guys have proven to be even far worse than I thought.

Is that better? 🤗

[aubiefifty 16,705]

On 4/18/2019 at 9:36 PM, SaturdayGT said:

    Because Government officials have long been a pillar of honesty. Lying to the press was unheard of until Trump and these guys took over....

see? your guys get caught lying and all you have are deflections. you forgot to throw in hillary as well. the truth is you folks do not care much of what happens in a negative nature when your side does something crooked. convince me i am wrong.

[Mikey 16,550]

Sadly, I have come to accept that the most recent (and probably last) honest person to occupy the White House was Jimmy Carter. The rest are all knaves of one sort or another, so I'll support my kind of knave, and that's someone who puts America first. ie: Trump over Clinton.

If the above and similar tripe is all that we got from a two year multi-million dollar witch hunt I'd say it was money poorly spent. Or in more simple terms, Who Cares?

[aubiefifty 16,705]

9 minutes ago, Mikey said:

Sadly, I have come to accept that the most recent (and probably last) honest person to occupy the White House was Jimmy Carter. The rest are all knaves of one sort or another, so I'll support my kind of knave, and that's someone who puts America first. ie: Trump over Clinton.

If the above and similar tripe is all that we got from a two year multi-million dollar witch hunt I'd say it was money poorly spent. Or in more simple terms, Who Cares?

mikey if someone on the left was charged with all this you know damn well you would be all over it.

[Mikey 16,550]

1 minute ago, aubiefifty said:

mikey if someone on the left was charged with all this you know damn well you would be all over it.

Obama and his administration did this and much, much worse. No need to even start on the Clintons and Russia. Being all over it doesn't matter.

[aubiefifty 16,705]

1 minute ago, Mikey said:

Obama and his administration did this and much, much worse. No need to even start on the Clintons and Russia. Being all over it doesn't matter.

it should matter tho mikey. and if obama and his administration did the same or worse they should get hammered. and as much as the right hated obama and mitch and company vowed to work against him from day one i am pretty sure they would have already brought charges against him. and once again one of the biggest problems in washington is crooks can have a field day because we are more focused on party fights etc. they are getting more brazen breaking the law and getting rich doing it.

[homersapien 11,353]

17 minutes ago, Mikey said:

Obama and his administration did this and much, much worse. No need to even start on the Clintons and Russia. Being all over it doesn't matter.

Whatever mistakes Obama made in policy decisions he is certainly not in the same league as Trump when it comes to venality and lying.  Not even close.  Trump is absolutely historic in that respect. 

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

34 minutes ago, aubiefifty said:

mikey if someone on the left was charged with all this you know damn well you would be all over it.

"Charged" ?

Do you honestly think any side is consistent - i.e., your friends on the left?? 

I am asking because you never "call" them out or complain about them. Are they consistent, or is there another reason for your selectiveness? I will appreciate a direct answer. 

One poster who is genuinely consistent that comes to mind is the one and only @Brad_ATX. And guess what, we disagree on  a TON of issues.

[aubiefifty 16,705]

Just now, NolaAuTiger said:

"Charged" ?

Do you honestly think any side is consistent - i.e., your friends on the left?? 

I am asking because you never "call" them out or complain about them. Are they consistent, or is there another reason for your selectiveness? I will appreciate a direct answer. 

One poster who is genuinely consistent that comes to mind is the one and only @Brad_ATX. And guess what, we disagree on  a TON of issues.

i am pretty sure i just said they all should be called out in a reply to mikey. as far as the charges being brought against obama i have heard of none other than wishful thinking. i have not been a very big fan of his since i watched a couple of documentaries concerning his actions with the flint water crisis. you certainly do not see me lying to protect anyone on the left.

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

2 minutes ago, aubiefifty said:

i am pretty sure i just said they all should be called out in a reply to mikey. as far as the charges being brought against obama i have heard of none other than wishful thinking. i have not been a very big fan of his since i watched a couple of documentaries concerning his actions with the flint water crisis. you certainly do not see me lying to protect anyone on the left.

Thank you for the answer. I did not see that reply. 

[aubiefifty 16,705]

2 minutes ago, NolaAuTiger said:

Thank you for the answer. I did not see that reply. 

this is the thing with me nola. i can be misled and misunderstand something but other than glorifying a bullsh*t story i try to be a very honest person. and i also value people that speak the truth no matter how much it hurts.

[NolaAuTiger 3,295]

5 minutes ago, aubiefifty said:

this is the thing with me nola. i can be misled and misunderstand something but other than glorifying a bullsh*t story i try to be a very honest person. and i also value people that speak the truth no matter how much it hurts.

I was just curious if you ever get into with "left" posters or not. 

[aubiefifty 16,705]

2 minutes ago, NolaAuTiger said:

I was just curious if you ever get into with "left" posters or not. 

oh i disagree with a lot of left stuff. i do not like abortion. i have a gun at home for protection. i will confess that since the" make america great shoot a lib" t shirts came out and the many comments about how evil libs are  i am probably guilty of circling the wagons so to speak. but yes. i have argued with libs over obama's handling of the flint water crisis. i think we need to do more about immigration i just cannot stand how trump and company are doing it.