By Kurt Bardella
5/5/18
Everybody lies. It’s just a fact of life. We lie to our spouses when they ask, “Do you like my shoes?” and we say “yes.” We lie to our friends when we say we can’t go out because of another obligation when we’re really binge-watching “Game of Thrones” on the couch. We lie to our bosses when we call in sick to work when really, we hit it a little too hard at happy hour the night before. We lie to our kids when they ask us if a certain mythical creature who trespasses every Christmas Eve is real. When we are kids, we lie to our parents to avoid getting into trouble, even though it rarely works. These “white lies” of course are completely harmless and can even be an act of friendship or love. But what happens when your job requires you to lie or when you know your boss is lying to you? What happens when the lies you tell aren’t harmless, but are incredibly consequential? This is the predicament White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders found herself in Thursday afternoon at the White House press briefing.In the wake of Trump legal adviser Rudy Giuliani’s revelation that President Donald Trump reimbursed his attorney Michael Cohen for a six-figure payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels, Sanders was besieged with questions about her own statements to the press about the payment.
In March, Sanders was quoted in The New York Times saying, “I’ve had conversations with the president about this. … There was no knowledge of any payments from the president, and he has denied all these allegations.” On Thursday, Sanders was confronted by the White House press corps with direct questions no spokesperson ever wants to hear: “Were you lying to us at the time? Or were you in the dark?” It’s a fair question. Either Sanders was lying about her conversations with the president in March or the president lied to her in those conversations. Neither answer is a good one if you’re Sanders. But what Sanders is going through right now reminds me very much of what I went through before I made the decision to resign working with Breitbart News in the wake of an incident between then-Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields and then-Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. When you get to a point when you are being lied to, you know you are being lied to, and the reporters you are talking to know you are lying to them, it’s time to walk away. I know better than most that walking away is not an easy thing to do. But at some point, you should be able to look yourself in the mirror and own the choices you have made. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is at an inflection point in her career where she can be remembered either as the person who helped Donald Trump lie every day or as the person who said “enough is enough” and did something about it.
