Sarah Sanders leaves White House after hiding from press for a record-setting 109 days

Sarah Sanders is ending her tenure as White House press secretary on Friday after a whopping 109 days of refusing to officially brief the press.

“Today I’ll walk out the gates of the White House for the last time as Press Secretary with my head held high,” she wrote on Friday. “It’s been the honor and privilege of a lifetime to work with President @realDonaldTrump and his amazing team the last three and a half years.”

Sanders has not held a White House press briefing since March 11 — and even in that briefing she only held court for 15 minutes, largely avoiding reporters’ questions.

The closest Sanders came to holding an official press event since then was a phony briefing with children given on Take Our Daughters and Sons To Work Day back in April.

She avoided giving the briefing, a key component of her job, for so long that at one point her podium was covered in a thick coating of dust.

According to the University of California Santa Barbara, Sanders went a longer time between briefings than any of the preceding 13 press secretaries. And that data was from October 2018, when Sanders’ longest hiding streak was much shorter than her final 109-day gap. Sanders routinely set, and then broke, her own records for the longest period with no White House press briefing.

Avoidance, hostility, and blatant lying have characterized the vast majority of Sanders’ tenure as White House press secretary, which began on July 26, 2017.

Sanders admitted in sworn testimony during the Mueller investigation that she lied to reporters about why then-FBI director James Comey was fired. Sanders had claimed that FBI agents had lost confidence in him, but this was fabricated. Comey was forced out by Trump because he would not publicly vouch for Trump’s innocence in the Russia investigation.

Along with the lying and hiding, Sanders also attacked members of the press for doing their jobs and ran to her ideological allies at Fox News to complain that unpleasant truths about Trump were being discussed.

Sanders’ tenure was filled with disgraceful conduct, day in and day out. That she would leave the position with her “head held high” does more to indict her character than any outsider could.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.