Sarah Sanders Says Trump Isn’t Concerned That Flynn Lied to FBI and Worked For Foreign Power
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders conducted her first press briefing since Nov. 27 and addressed a number of questions from the press corps, many of which focused on Michael Flynn’s sentencing hearing earlier Tuesday. While the sentencing was delayed to mid-March 2019, Flynn refused to retract his guilty pleas of lying to FBI agents and earned a harsh rebuke from Judge Emmet Sullivan.
CBS News’ Stephen Portnoy came straight from the Flynn hearing to ask Sanders to put Flynn’s cooperation in context with Trump former attorney Michael Cohen, who President Donald Trump has dismissed as a “rat.” Portnoy noted that Flynn “has cooperated with special counsel’s office, met with them 19 times,” before asking “Is there a particular reason why the president has not said that he is a rat the way he said Michael Cohen is a rat for cooperating prosecutors?”
Sanders batted that question away saying “We know Michael Cohen to be a liar on a number of fronts and the president’s opinion is extremely clear on that front. I don’t see any reason to go beyond that comment at this point.”
But Sanders was not finished dealing with Cohen/Flynn comparisons. Washington Post reporter Josh Dawsey followed up by asking “Is the president concern that Michael Flynn lied to representatives of his own government and was working for another government during the campaign?”
Sanders was equally dismissive, saying that Flynn described the activities in which he engaged “don’t have anything to do with the president.” She then turned to the time-honored and full-throated defense of any Trump-Russian collusion.
Sanders said: “Let’s remember what the whole thing that this started is supposed to be about. It is whether or not Russia influenced the election and whether or not the president had anything to do with it. We know that Russia tried to create chaos within the election certainly not that they actually impacted it. The only reason the president is the president is because he was a better candidate and beat Hillary Clinton. We also know that the president never colluded with Russia that is the whole reason we have we know those things to be false.”
Watch the segment above courtesy of Fox Business.
