Sarah Sanders Repeatedly Lies About Trump Making Military Death Notification Calls

Reed RichardsonSep 8th, 2020, 6:35 pm
 

Former White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is still defending her old boss, President Donald Trump, and she is still misleading the public as she does it.

During her nearly two years as the Trump’s chief spokesperson, Sanders developed a dubious reputation for dishonesty that got her branded the “Queen of Gaslighting” by one media critic. And Sanders infamously admitted under oath to the Mueller probe that she made up her claim that “countless” rank-and-file members of the FBI had contacted the White House to express their support for Trump. And after the bombshell story about Trump broke in The Atlantic last week, igniting widespread outrage about Trump’s allegedly vicious insults and condescension toward military veterans and war dead, Sanders, in the middle of a media tour for her book Speaking for Myself, leapt back to the defense of the president.

With similarly deceptive results, it turns out.

Last Friday, the day after the blockbuster piece landed — and as other news organizations were confirming some of its claims — Sanders went on the record, along with 10 other former or current Trump White House officials, denying the story’s central claim that he selfishly cancelled a trip to a cemetery of WWI American war dead during a trip to France and mocked their sacrifice. Calling the story “total BS,” Sanders pointed out that she was part of the president’s inner circle  and that she has “sat in the room when our President called family members after their sons were killed in action and it was heart-wrenching…”

Make no mistake, talking with the grieving families of those who Americans who have been wounded or paid the ultimate price in service of the country, is among the most difficult aspects of the toughest job in the world. No question. Each president has had to reckon with how they will reach out those who have lost a son or daughter, husband or wife, father or mother. And Sanders’ pushback, however one feels about Trump, is factually accurate with what we already know about the trip and the notoriously difficult job of being president.

But then on Sunday, in an attempt to embroider Trump’s patriotic bona fides even further, Sanders went beyond her previous statement and instead pushed a verifiably false claim in a video on Twitter. Notably, she captioned that video by blasting the “malicious lies” about Trump.

“I’ve also sat in the room when the president had to make the most difficult calls of his presidency, when he had to let a parent know that their son had been killed in the line of duty,” Sanders forcefully claimed. “That’s a call no president want to make. In those moments, I saw the president’s heart and also saw his commitment to the men and women of our great military. That story couldn’t be further from the truth.”

That part of her story wasn’t truthful, though. In fact, it is military protocol that all death notifications are made in person and never by phone, for various reasons. In the U.S. Army, they are done by an assigned Army casualty notification officer or team, per AR 600-1. Next of kin notifications are never done via phone, by anyone, even the President of the United States.

Was this merely a slip of the tongue by Sanders? For someone whose job it is to speak precisely, that answer doesn’t really hold water, but any benefit of the doubt vanished when he repeated the same misleading claim on Good Morning America on Tuesday morning. This time, after she railed at The Atlantic, co-host George Stephanopoulos fairly gently pushed back, noting that the president, in fact, does not do what she just said he does.

“You said something I want to clarify. You said you were with the president when he called the family to notify them their son had been killed in Afghanistan,” Stephanopoulos said, teeing up his fact-check, before offering Sanders a helpful lifeline. “I thought it was military protocol that it was always the military that went in person to see the parents. Are you talking about a condolence call?”

“Yes, correct a condolence call, after that individual had been notified,” Sanders now said.

Sanders appeared to have learned her lesson when, to helpfully correct the record, she retweeted her entire interview, Stephanopoulos fact-check and all, on GMA not long after it took place.

And yet, Sanders then flipped again, all but confirming her first possibly innocent mistake and second — corrected — misleading claim were no longer just good-faith examples of misspeaking. Because less than two hours after retweeting the nearly six minute-long GMA interview, in which her false claim appeared halfway through, the former WH press secretary pushed out a shorter, roughly one minute-long snippet of her ABC News hit. With big, bold lettering above and below the video slamming the The Atlantic story and calling it “FALSE,” Sanders outright lied this time, intentionally, by cutting off the clip at the very moment where she was about to be called out for pushing the highly emotional “notification call” anecdote. Which simply was not true.

Again, condolence calls to surviving kin of fallen U.S. service members are never easy to make for any president. And it would be unfair to cite a very public example of Trump botching one very badly to claim he has little genuine respect for the military. But Sanders’ apparent need to push the envelope and resort to making things up — when she of all people should absolutely know better — speaks to a long-running pattern of deception on her part. Even though she left the White House year ago, and notwithstanding the title of her new book, it’s clear that Sanders is still very much speaking for Donald Trump first and foremost, and likewise still prioritizing his public image over the truth.

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