White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders was criticized on the set of CNN’s “New Day,” with the show’s new co-host John Berman ripping her over a false statement she made over who authored the official White House response to the news that Donald Trump Jr. had secretly met with a Russian lawyer.
“Maybe she’s OK with lying. There’s no question that she spread lies at this point,” said Berman. “Whether or not she was told the truth, I guess we don’t know, but she spread a lie and she is the White House press secretary and she spread a lie and allowed it to hang out there for months.”
Also on set was former Bill Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart, who said Sanders didn’t “have any usefulness now,” and that if he were in her position, he would just resign.
So how did we get here?
Last year after the New York Times reported that Trump Jr. met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower just months before his father was elected president, he released a statement insisting that the meeting wasn’t about obtaining information on the Clinton campaign and the whole matter had just been about “adoption.”
The initial statement considerably understated Veselnitskaya’s true purpose for being at Trump Tower, which was to lobby for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act. At the time, Sanders told reporters that President Trump “certainly didn’t dictate” the statement for his son. Yet in a letter to the special counsel, Trump’s legal team admitted that he did in fact author the statement. On Monday, Sanders was grilled repeatedly and dodged the issue multiple times.
CNN replayed the footage on “New Day.”
“How is that acceptable?” asked co-host Alisyn Camerota. “For her not to take any responsibility for what comes out of her mouth.”