We are on Day 2 of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders refusing to explain her false statement about the president's own misleading statement on a 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump's presidential campaign and a Russian lawyer.
In fact, Sanders won't even acknowledge she was wrong last summer when she told reporters President Trump “certainly didn't dictate" the statement released by Donald Trump Jr., which said the meeting was about adoptions when it was really about the 2016 campaign.
It's an absolutely mystifying strategy that, so far, has no logical defense. At least not one that Sanders has found.
What Sanders says about the president's involvement could shape the special counsel investigation into whether Trump obstructed justice. And it could certainly impact public opinion: It just doesn't look good for Team Trump to be doing more obfuscating about this critical meeting.
Here's the background: Last summer, Sanders told reporters in a news briefing that President Trump “certainly didn't dictate" a misleading statement to the New York Times that claimed a 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer was about adoptions. (Emails showed Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. took the meeting after being promised dirt by the Russians on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.)
The reason we're talking about all this again: The New York Times published a memo over the weekend revealing Trump's own lawyers say he did dictate that misleading statement.
Rather than acknowledge she was wrong about the president's involvement, Sanders has since refused to even talk about it.
On Monday, she rather incredulously tried to argue she isn't the right person to ask about her own false statement, pointing reporters to Trump's outside legal team.
On Tuesday, when reporters pressed her about it some half-dozen more times, she insisted she tries her best to provide accurate information to them.
“I work day in and day out," she said after The Washington Post's Josh Dawsey pushed her several times to say whether her statement in August was accurate or inaccurate. "... [You] know I'm an honest person who works extremely hard to provide you with accurate information at all times, and I'm going to continue to do that, but I'm not going to engage on matters that deal with the outside counsel."
“My credibility's probably higher than the media's," she said at one point, which has nothing to do with this specific statement and is extremely subjective.
We'd call all this a non-denial denial, but Sanders isn't even denying she gave a false statement from the White House podium. It's like Sanders got caught with her hand in the cookie jar, and rather than acknowledge she was taking a cookie, she starts explaining that she's really an honest person most days.
It's not clear why she won't acknowledge the error. Is she protecting her own pride? Perhaps. Her boss's abiding strategy is to double down and admit no wrong.
It's also possible she's trying to protect the president, who is being investigated by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III in connection with possible obstruction of the FBI probe into whether his campaign worked with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election.
This Trump Tower meeting was already a key piece of evidence in the collusion investigation; legal experts have said that Trump Jr. and top Trump campaign aides even taking the meeting likely met the legal definition of collusion, or conspiracy with a foreign government.
It could also play into the obstruction of justice aspect of Mueller's investigation. It was never clear whether Trump knew about the meeting before or immediately after. But he got himself involved last summer when the New York Times was about to reveal its existence to the world. From the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Germany, Trump told his son to say the meeting about Clinton was really about something more benign.
Trump, in other words, made a bad situation for him worse.
“This was . . . unnecessary,” one of the president's advisers told The Post in July. “Now someone can claim he’s the one who attempted to mislead. Somebody can argue the president is saying he doesn’t want you to say the whole truth."
For a president being investigated in connection with possible obstruction of justice for any number of actions, trying to mislead journalists about a key piece of evidence doesn't look good. We know Sanders was doing some of the misleading, whether she knew it at the time, and now she's refusing to acknowledge it.
At one point, a reporter asked Sanders whether she was reluctant to talk about the Trump Tower statement because she, too, was being questioned by the special counsel. Rather than answer the question, she again pointed people to outside lawyers to explain her own false statement.
If Sanders is trying to tamp down speculation about Trump's involvement in all this, she's doing the opposite.