Sarah Sanders to Resign at End of June
Sarah Huckabee Sanders will resign from her position as White House press secretary at the end of the month, President Trump announced on Twitter Thursday afternoon.
….She is a very special person with extraordinary talents, who has done an incredible job! I hope she decides to run for Governor of Arkansas – she would be fantastic. Sarah, thank you for a job well done!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2019
Sanders, the daughter of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, succeeded Sean Spicer as White House press secretary in July 2017. She first joined the administration as Spicer’s deputy after joining the Trump campaign as a communications aide in the wake of her father’s failed presidential bid in 2016.
The traditional White House press-briefing process broke down on Sanders’s watch. She last held a briefing on March 11, 94 days ago, and earlier in her tenure, when briefings were more frequent, she was routinely accused of misleading reporters from the White House podium and contradicting Trump’s public statements.
Most recently, Sanders was pilloried after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report revealed that she had misled reporters about Trump’s motivations for firing former FBI director James Comey.
In an attempt to substantiate her claim that Comey was fired for performance issues — rather than to impede the Mueller probe, as many suspected — Sanders told reporters that “countless” FBI agents lost confidence in Comey ahead of his firing. Asked about the statement by Mueller’s team, Sanders said it was a “slip of the tongue” for which she had no evidence.
Sanders was previously derided by members of the press and congressional Democrats after Trump’s lawyers admitted last year that he dictated Donald Trump Jr.’s false public statement regarding the infamous Trump Tower meeting. Months earlier, Sanders told reporters that the president had no role in crafting the inaccurate statement.
