Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ lies and gaslighting about Donald Trump’s likely criminal behavior are despicable but the credibility she gets on Fox News, the favorite network of millions of Americans, is the bigger problem for Democrats.
Appearing on the supposedly “straight news” show, America’s Newsroom, this morning, Huckabee Sanders was allowed to lie through her teeth without challenge.
HUCKABEE SANDERS: The only corruption in this entire process has to do with the Bidens. It’s not the president, it’s not the White House, it’s the fact that Joe Biden was acting inappropriately and making probably sweetheart deals for his son. That’s the corruption in this process.
FACT CHECK: This Republican conspiracy theory was completely debunked long ago. Huckabee Sanders’ use of the word “probably” shows that even she won’t say she knows Biden did anything wrong.
But neither anchor challenged a word. So Huckabee Sanders, an admitted liar, continued with even more unchallenged BS.
HUCKABEE SANDERS: The president shouldn’t be getting impeached. He should be getting celebrated for draining the swamp and following through on another one of his campaign promises. The hypocrisy and the level of fake outrage from the Democrats is really astonishing and something that hopefully the media and the American people will continue to call out as this process plays out.
Huckabee Sanders used the same "Trump should be celebrated" line last night on Hannity. Apparently, she liked it so much, she repeated it.
Huckabee Sanders went on to claim that Trump “was acting as he should have” when he asked the president of Ukraine to “do me a favor, though” after President Volodymyr Zelensky said he wanted military aid.
Yet she suddenly shrugged off the supposed Biden corruption. Later, Sanders said, “I think the biggest thing here to look at is the fact that Nancy Pelosi made her impeachment inquiry announcement prior to ever having any information. That should be looked into.”
That’s another Huckabee Sanders lie. Speaker Pelosi launched the impeachment inquiry after Trump acknowledged he had urged Zelensky to investigate Biden. And it's an inquiry, not an actual impeachment.
But neither anchor challenged a word here either.
Instead, co-anchor Bill Hemmer asked a few questions about who might have spoken to the whistleblower who ignited the scandal and “why move the transcripts of these phone calls to a private system? There may be a perfectly acceptable reason for it but why do it?”
Predictably, Huckabee Sanders provided no information. She called that “irrelevant,” said she didn’t know who decided to do that but defended the process anyway. “Well, I think that you want to protect that information,” she said dismissively and without a concern for what Trump may have been trying to hide. She said Trump should be able to talk to foreign leaders “without every single detail of that being public. I don’t understand what the issue is.”
That was the end of any concern from the co-anchors, too.
Co-anchor Sandra Smith helpfully pointed out that Huckabee Sanders had left the White House in June, before Trump’s July 25th call with Zelensky.
But the Trump administration told Congress it was releasing the aid to Ukraine on February 28 and repeated that assertion to Congress again on May 23. Funny how neither of these “straight news anchors” asked Sanders about that nor about any of the other suspicious events involving Trump and Ukraine that occurred during her tenure.
They didn’t even ask about Fox’s own scoop that Giuliani was not working alone in Ukraine, that “the Pentagon, State Department, and National Security Council were unanimous in supporting military aid to Ukraine,” and that Trump had withheld the aid on his own.
As the segment ended, Hemmer made sure to let Huckabee Sanders know they're on the same team. “Hey Sarah, come back soon, OK? We’ve got a million questions and welcome to the Fox family.”
“Welcome,” Smith echoed.
See what Democrats are up against below, from the October 1, 2019 America’s Newsroom.