Anchor Brutally Grills Sarah Sanders on Trump’s False Statements: ‘Was That a Display of Lying, Ignorance or Insanity?’

In a recent interview with ABC News Australia, former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was confronted on a number of topics related to President Donald Trump and her time in the administration.

The segment — getting renewed attention today after CNN’s Brian Stelter called it “the most interesting interview” of Sanders “I’ve seen in a long time” — started out with anchor Leigh Sales asking if the president can “tell the difference between the truth and a lie.”

Sanders turned that around on the media and said they attacked him with “false claims and “negative attack after negative attack” almost every day.

Sales brought up the exchange Trump had while in California during a briefing on the wildfires. One official at the briefing said, “If we ignore that science and put our head in the sand and think it’s all vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together in protecting Californians.”

“It’ll start getting cooler,’ Trump remarked. “You just watch.”

“I wish science agreed with you,” the official said.

“I don’t think science knows, actually,” the president responded.

Sales bluntly asked, “Was that a display of lying, ignorance, or insanity?”

Sanders didn’t directly answer and instead defended the president over that briefing and his leadership on that crisis.

After Sanders took more shots at the media, Sales said this:

So to believe you, somebody watching this interview has to believe that every former senior member of the Trump administration who’s left and spoken of his unfitness to lead has an ax to grind, that every former senior Republican who’s spoken out from Colin Powell to the late John McCain has an ax to grind, and then all of these lifelong Republicans are in cahoots with the Democrats and they’re all also tied up in a conspiracy with the mainstream media, and it’s the mainstream media that’s peddling lie after lie, not Donald Trump. That’s what you’re asking people to believe.

Sanders said there are hundreds of Republicans, herself included, who know Trump well and have defended him, dismissing comments from people like Colin Powell.

Sales questioned Sanders how she can reconcile her personal Christian beliefs with working for someone like Trump given everything he has said and done.

Sanders said that Trump came to her defense while liberals mocked her and attacked her, at one point bringing up the restaurant she was asked to leave.

Sales also confronted Sanders about her admission in an interview with the Mueller team, asking her directly, “Did you make up that countless members of the FBI told you that they had no confidence in James Comey?”

“I said that I shouldn’t have used that word,” Sanders said, while trying to defend the claim overall.

You can watch above, via ABC News.