Unlike previous administrations, where officials feared blows to their credibility in public, President Trump’s press aides are generally performing for an audience of one — the president.
PALM BEACH, Fla. — After admitting to investigators for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that she delivered a false statement from the White House podium, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, defended herself in Trumpian fashion on Friday morning. She counterattacked.
The Mueller report revealed that Ms. Sanders had acknowledged that her repeated claim in 2017 that she had personally communicated with “countless” F. B. I. officials who told her they were happy with President Trump’s decision to fire James B. Comey as the agency’s director was a “slip of the tongue” and not founded on any facts.
Asked on “Good Morning America” if the report had damaged her credibility, Ms. Sanders responded that she had made the statement in the heat of the moment, and that it was not “a scripted talking point.”
But then she added, “I’m sorry that I wasn’t a robot like the Democrat Party that went out for two and a half years and repeated time and time again that there was definitely Russian collusion between the president and his campaign.”
It has been a hallmark of the Trump White House never to admit a mistake, never to apologize and never to cede a point. This case was no different. “The White House staff will never be lectured on truth-telling from the media that pushed a flat-out lie about Donald Trump for two years,” Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, said in an email.
Ms. Sanders, who has often taken news media outlets to task for what they write and report and has accused them of spreading “fake news” about Mr. Trump, was just a footnote in Mr. Mueller’s 448-page report. But because of her public role, the anecdote involving her false statement loomed large in the broader portrait by the special counsel of a White House defined by a culture of dishonesty.
And it remains to be seen how the incident and Ms. Sanders’s response will affect her credibility with reporters, with whom she has had fewer interactions than many of her predecessors since the White House quietly phased out the daily press briefing over the past nine months.
More often, Ms. Sanders speaks for the president on friendly programs like “Fox & Friends.” She has also come to view her role as a person who defends her colleagues and the president, rather than someone who delivers a message to the press about the work that is underway at the White House.
