Gonna be a busy day, folks. Fortunately for Sean Spicer, he’s on Navy Reserve duty today, and Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is filling in. Spicey would be a stuttering mess on the subject of FBI Director James Comey’s termination, but Sanders is equally problematic in that she simply tends to repeat the same talking points lies. And that’s exactly what happened on Morning Joe, where she evaded Comey questions and claimed that there’s no evidence of Trump campaign collusion with Russia.
Deflect and lie. That’s what Sanders did over and over again. A few relevant clips illustrate this, and above, Willie Geist asked Sanders why Trump praised Comey for reopening the Clinton email probe weeks before the election, but the administration is now claiming that Comey’s handling of the probe is why he was fired. Huckabee wasn’t about to discuss specifics:
“I think it’s real simple. The Deputy Attorney General [Rod Rosenstein] made a very strong recommendation. The president followed it and he made a quick and decisive action to fire James Comey.”
Huckabee Sanders also claimed that Comey’s termination wasn’t at all about Russia, but then she moves on to assert that all investigations about Trump-Russia ties should end. She’s obviously reciting a script, which only confirms that out of the multiple reasons that have been floated for Trump’s firing of FBI James Comey, his rage over the FBI’s investigation into Russia sticks out as the most telling one. Comey refused to bury Russia stories and was leading one of the investigations. Trump wanted him gone.
Yet despite the fact that all of the investigations — the FBI and the Congressional ones — are ongoing, Sanders insisted that “person after person” and “everyone” agreed that there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Putin regime. She even pulled host Joe Scarborough into the mix (in the below video), and he pushed back:
“Whoa whoa whoa. I’ve got to interrupt. I said there’s no obvious evidence of collusion out there right now” If there were that obvious evidence of collusion, it would have already been leaked by now. I also said there have to be in-depth investigations because it may take, I think, probably an independent prosecutor to figure out the financial ties between Donald Trump and Russia.
Scarborough also wasn’t thrilled with how Sanders was “twisting my words” while she kept merrily insisting — alternative facts are alive and well — that all of the investigations into Russia “yielded nothing” for “almost an entire year.” To which she was reminded that the probes have only just begun, but Sanders kept insisting that “everyone” agreed that there was no collusion.
At that point, host Mika Brzezinski had finally had enough: “You’re actually not telling the truth right now.”
(Via MSNBC & video courtesy of Washington Free Beacon)