Sarah Huckabee Sanders confessed to Robert Mueller
Sarah Huckabee Sanders is willing to lie to the media and to the American people in order to help Donald Trump get away with obstruction of justice, but she apparently wasn’t willing to lie about it all to Special Counsel Robert Mueller. According to today’s redacted Mueller report, Sanders confessed to Mueller’s team that she made false statements from the podium about the circumstances of Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey.
After Trump fired Comey, Sanders announced from the podium that she had heard from “countless” people in the FBI who had lost confidence in Comey. This was clearly an attempt at convincing the public that Trump fired Comey for legitimate reasons, and we all knew it at the time, just as we all knew that Trump actually fired Comey in the hope of killing off the Trump-Russia investigation.
According to the Mueller report, Sarah Huckabee Sanders admitted to Mueller’s team that no one inside the FBI had made any such remarks to her. She alternately blamed it on a “slip of the tongue” and being in the “heat of the moment,” which is absurd on its face. The reality is that she lied. To be clear, this isn’t like when Sean Spicer lied about crowd size, which was dishonest but wasn’t an attempt at covering up or facilitating a crime. This lie told by Sanders was an attempt at helping Trump get away with felony obstruction of justice.
We’re not sure precisely what will come of this. We’re not even sure why Sarah Huckabee Sanders wasn’t criminally indicted for conspiracy to obstruct justice. Under normal circumstances, one might expect her to resign, now that she’s been caught admitting she made false statements from the podium to try to help Trump get away with a felony. One might also expect Trump to fire her, now that he knows she helped Mueller by confessing. But these aren’t normal circumstances. We’ll see how this plays out.
