President Trump’s surprise Thursday announcement that Sarah Sanders is stepping down as his press secretary followed a pair of stern rebukes by members of the White House press corps.
In pitches to the group’s voting membership, two candidates competing to become the next president of the White House Correspondents’ Association accused the Trump administration of consistently spreading lies and the president of unfairly attacking the media.
“We as an organization need to be more concerned about getting lied to as a matter of course – and the American public getting lied to, through us – than about access,” HuffPost correspondent S.V. Dáte wrote in an email, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.
“I’ve been in this business more than three decades, and what’s happening now is unprecedented. We are attacked on a near daily basis using Stalinist language,” he added. “We are called corrupt and dishonest. We are given false information from staff who often know full well that it is false.”
CBS News Radio’s Steven Portnoy cast the White House press shop as one that ignored several controversial issues by refusing to hold a formal press conference for more than 90 days. “As the president continues to call news organizations ‘corrupt,’ these are just some of the issues he has ducked by not having his aides appear regularly before the press corps,” Portnoy said.
Dáte also noted how special counsel Robert Mueller found Sanders lied to the media when she said former FBI Director James Comey was fired in part because “countless” members of the FBI had lost confidence in him.
“I’m certainly not the only one who thinks [lying] is an issue,” he said. “It seems over the last several months, over the past year, we haven’t really talked about it.”
“I think we have a right not to have a paid employee of the executive branch lie to us,” Dáte said, adding that he would have sought a WHCA statement of disapproval in response to the Mueller report.
“I don’t know if it would have done any good at all,” he said. “But we shouldn’t just shrug and move on.”
Olivier Knox of SiriusXM Radio, the current president of the WHCA, declined to comment for the story, and Sanders did not respond to a request for comment.
The day after the report was published, President Trump announced Sanders’ departure at the end of the month.
“After 3 1/2 years, our wonderful Sarah Huckabee Sanders will be leaving the White House at the end of the month and going home to the Great State of Arkansas….,” the president tweeted, adding, “….She is a very special person with extraordinary talents, who has done an incredible job! I hope she decides to run for Governor of Arkansas – she would be fantastic. Sarah, thank you for a job well done!”
