Sarah Huckabee Sanders has a whole new scandal on her hands
Yesterday, Bob Woodward asserted that Secretary of Defense James Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly had called Donald Trump mentally incompetent and mentally unstable behind his back. Several hours later, supposed statements from Mattis and Kelly both appeared on Trump’s Twitter account within seconds of each other. That was suspicious enough, until the whole thing turned into a disaster for White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
If the Mattis and Kelly statements were real, why weren’t they issued by Mattis and Kelly? Why would two men craft statements in support of their boss, and then have their boss release them? It lacks credibility from the start. But here’s the real trouble: eleven minutes after Donald Trump’s Twitter account posted the twin statements attributed to Mattis and Kelly, a third statement was posted, this time from Sarah Huckabee Sanders. This is where things went entirely off the rails.
Why would Sanders need to release a statement of her own? Yes, she’s the Press Secretary. But her job is to speak for members of the administration when they’re not speaking for themselves. Her own statement served no purpose. It did, however, give us a hint about who might have really written the Mattis and Kelly statements. Mattis supposedly called Bob Woodward’s book “fiction” in his statement and then moments later Sanders called it “fabricated” in her statement, and so on.
Whether the Sarah Huckabee Sanders statement was her idea or Donald Trump’s idea, it ended up being too clever by half. It turned a debacle into a disaster. It swiftly confirmed what we already thought we knew about the first two statements: they were fake. Now we just have to wait and see if any major news outlets are gutsy enough to call her out on it to her face at the next press briefing. Mattis and Kelly can’t refute these two statements without risking their jobs, but the media can blow this open.
