Does Sarah Huckabee Sanders stand by something she said last August? According to the White House press secretary, that’s a question she can’t answer. In fact, she’ll refer you to President Trump’s outside counsel.
At her briefing Monday, Sanders was asked three times about her comments on August 1, 2017, when she said the president “didn’t dictate” a statement issued by his son, Donald Trump Jr., to the New York Times. The Times had reported weeks earlier about the younger Trump’s meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer who had promised useful information about the likely Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Clinton. Don Jr. issued a lengthy statement explaining the meeting (which included Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort) was not useful or productive and that then-candidate Trump was not aware it took place. After reports emerged that President Trump had actually written his son’s statement, Sanders denied it on August 1.
“Look, the statement that Don Jr. issued is true. There’s no inaccuracy in the statement. The president weighed in as any father would, based on the limited information that he had,” she said at the time. “He certainly didn’t dictate, but he—like I said, he weighed in, offered suggestion like any father would do.”
But Sanders’s assertion that Trump did not dictate his son’s statement responding to the Times is in contradiction to a confidential letter sent by the president’s outside legal team to the office of special counsel Robert Mueller in January of this year. The Times acquired a copy of the letter and published it over the weekend. In the letter, the legal team says that Trump did dictate the statement (issued in Don Jr.’s name) about the Trump Tower meeting.
“You have received all of the notes, communications and testimony indicating that the President dictated a short but accurate response to the New York Times article on behalf of his son, Donald Trump, Jr. His son then followed up by making a full public disclosure regarding the meeting, including his public testimony that there was nothing to the meeting and certainly no evidence of collusion,” reads the letter.
Asked Monday how to reconcile the contradiction between her own statement on behalf of the White House and the admission from Trump’s legal team, Sanders declined to comment. “This is from a letter from the outside counsel, and I direct you to them to answer that question,” she said. Pressed again to explain on “what basis” Sanders made her comment in August that Trump had not dictated the statement, the press secretary declined and directed reporters to the outside counsel.
“I can’t answer,” she said. “I’m not going to get into a back and forth, and I’d encourage you to reach out to the outside counsel.” Once more, when asked how reporters can trust what Sanders says from the podium is accurate given the contradiction on this question of whether President Trump dictated the statement, Sanders refused to defend her own statements and said she would not respond to a letter from the president’s outside counsel.
Why does all this matter? It’s worth remembering how big of a bombshell the New York Times report on Don Jr.’s Trump Tower meeting was. Coming just two months after the naming of Mueller as special counsel, the Times report was the most substantive evidence that Russian nationals tried to directly influence the Trump campaign.
There was a scramble to respond to the report from Team Trump, which was inconsistent with its story from the get-go. First, Don Jr. claimed the meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya was “short” and mostly about “Russian adoption policy.” He also claimed he did not know who he would be meeting with before he agreed to it and brought along Kushner and Manafort, two top members of the Trump campaign. But shortly after the initial Times story, Don Jr. claimed the meeting was brokered because of the promise that Veselnitskaya had dirt on Hillary Clinton and that when the meeting turned to adoption policy, he lost interest in the meeting. (In an email exchange with a British publicist and friend who set up the meeting, Don Jr. had been told the Russian he would meet with had incriminating information about Clinton. “If it’s what you say I love it,” the younger Trump had responded.) The one consistent part of Don Jr.’s story was that his father did not know about the meeting.
This new story was found in Don Jr.’s statement to the New York Times that Trump’s lawyers told the special counsel the president himself had dictated—which, again, Sanders denied.
Left unanswered by Monday’s White House briefing was the question of who was telling the truth about Trump’s dictation—Sanders or the Trump legal team? Considering that the White House press secretary refused to defend her past statements, and considering that Trump’s lawyers made their statement in a confidential letter to the federal prosecutors working for Robert Mueller, it seems more likely than not that Trump did, in fact, write the statement.
So this question remains: Why would the president feel the need to personally review a statement from his son, a private citizen, about a meeting the president had been unaware of?
