White House press secretary Sarah Sanders cast doubt on a CBS News report Wednesday claiming that she and principal deputy press secretary Raj Shah intend to leave the White House in the near future.
CBS originally reported that Shah has weighed leaving the White House but has not yet set an end date for his employment. Additionally, CBS claimed that Sanders has informed those close to her she will leave her White House post at the end of 2018, which the White House press secretary pushed back against in a tweet later that night.
“Does @CBSNews know something I don’t about my plans and my future? I was at my daughter’s year-end Kindergarten event and they ran a story about my ‘plans to leave the WH’ without even talking to me. I love my job and am honored to work for @POTUS,” she wrote.
Does @CBSNews know something I don’t about my plans and my future? I was at my daughter’s year-end Kindergarten event and they ran a story about my “plans to leave the WH” without even talking to me. I love my job and am honored to work for @POTUS
— Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) June 14, 2018
CBS cited sources inside the White House and close to the administration and claimed that neither Sanders nor Shah responded to repeated requests for comment, which runs contrary to Sanders’ tweet.
The White House did not immediately respond to inquiries from the Washington Examiner about the story.
The report comes as other high-profile White House staffers have left their posts this year, including former White House communications director Hope Hicks, Jared Kushner’s top communications aide, Josh Raffel, National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton, and others.
“There will be even more people leaving the White House sooner rather than later, laid off or just leaving out of exhaustion. And it is going to be harder to find good people to replace them,” a source close to the administration said, per CBS News. “I do think they’re going to have a harder time getting the second wave of people in than the first, because those people were loyalists, and [new] folks will have to be recruited and encouraged and then survive the vetting process. In addition to all of that, the president prefers to have a small communications staff.”
