Mueller report exposes all the president’s liars
WASHINGTON — Addressing reporters from the White House lectern, press secretary Sarah Sanders made a startling claim shortly after President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey two years ago.
“I've heard from countless members of the FBI that are grateful and thankful for the president's decision,” she said, refusing to back down when pressed on the issue. “Between emails, text messages, absolutely,” she insisted.
It wasn't true.
She later told prosecutors working for special counsel Robert Mueller that her comments were a “slip of the tongue.”
It's a crime to lie to federal investigators or Congress, a lesson that many of Trump's associates found out the hard way. But it's not a crime to lie to reporters and the American people.
The redacted, 448-page Mueller report released Thursday exposed in voluminous detail how the Trump White House is comfortable not only spinning the truth, but outright demolishing it.
Sometimes the president did the lying himself. Sometimes he had others tell lies for him. And sometimes people just lied because they thought it was required of them.
After the president fired Comey, the White House issued a statement saying that Trump had acted on a recommendation from the Justice Department. But Trump had previously decided to sack Comey, and Reince Priebus, then chief of staff, told investigators he believed the president personally dictated the misleading statement.
Days later, when Mueller was appointed special counsel, White House officials told reporters that Trump was undisturbed by the development.
In fact, he was devastated.
“This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency,” he said, according to notes taken by an aide.
Trump sometimes lied to his own aides. One episode involved a resignation letter prepared by Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, who had infuriated Trump by recusing himself from supervising the Russia investigation.
The president decided not to push out Sessions at the time, but he brought the letter with him on a trip to the Middle East, showing it to senior advisers aboard Air Force One.
Priebus was concerned that the president planned to use the letter as leverage over Sessions, and he asked about it during the trip. Trump falsely said the document was back in his White House residence.
Later that year, Trump tried to prevent the truth from coming out about a June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower with a Kremlin-connected lawyer and senior campaign officials.
Hope Hicks, then White House communications director, recalled telling Trump that emails setting up the meeting looked “really bad.”
The messages showed that the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was told the lawyer was working on behalf of the Russian government and would bring damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Then Trump Jr. had emailed back, “If it's what you say I love it.”
The president “directed aides not to publicly disclose the emails,” the report said.
When the meeting was revealed by The New York Times on July 8, 2017, Trump edited a public statement to conceal crucial details. He removed a line admitting the meeting involved someone who “might have information helpful to the campaign,” and he emphasized that participants talked about the adoption of Russian children. The statement was issued under Trump Jr.'s name.
The embarrassing emails soon leaked, contradicting the statement dictated by the president, but the lies continued.
“Over the next several days, the president's personal counsel repeatedly and inaccurately denied that the president played any role in drafting Trump Jr.'s statement,” the report said.
Once the president's role was revealed, he downplayed the importance of being honest with the public. “It's a statement to The New York Times. That's not a statement to a high tribunal of judges,” Trump told reporters.
The report makes clear that Trump leads a White House where falsehoods and misrepresentations are common practice.
Sanders tried to do damage control on her credibility Friday, insisting that her comments after Comey's firing were made in the “heat of the moment” and that she hadn't intentionally misled the American public.
“I said that it was in the heat of the moment, meaning it wasn't a scripted thing,” she said on “CBS This Morning.” “But the big takeaway here is that the sentiment is 100% accurate.”