Just two days after blaming White House reporters for her own abysmal performance as White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders surprised everyone today with a rare appearance in the White House briefing room—her first in nearly a month—where she mostly took questions about Donald Trump’s emphatic support for accused sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh, and cruel mockery of Kavanaugh’s alleged victim, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
Asked by reporter April Ryan about the blatant discrepancy between the president’s “guilty before proven innocent” defense of his Supreme Court nominee, and his many, many instances of demanding the exact opposite for others—most obviously with his demand that New York reinstate the death penalty for the (since exonerated) Central Park Five—Sanders awkwardly pivoted to the obvious logical conclusion to this line of questioning: President Bill Clinton.
“This president has taken this moment to say that he’s been affected personally by all of these allegations,” Ryan said. “And he’s picking and choosing—he’s said that the Central Park Five was guilty, and that he has made Bill Clinton guilty. Has he decided to change his mind on the Central Park Five, because they have been exonerated?”
Here was Sanders’ insane reply in full:
It’s interesting that you bring up Bill Clinton, nobody wants to hear those accusers’ voices be heard. But you’re certainly happy to hear all the others.
When Ryan noted that Trump had, in fact, given a national platform to multiple women who had accused Clinton of sexual impropriety by bringing them with him to a presidential debate, Sanders answered simply, “I’ve addressed this, I don’t have anything else to add.”
We’ve reached out to the White House for clarification on Sanders’ answer, and to see if the president has, in fact, reversed his opinion on the Central Park Five. We’ll update this story if they reply.
In the meantime, let’s all sit back and marvel at the fact that it’s 2018, and the White House still can’t give a straight answer on whether men whose innocence was proven nearly two decades ago are, in fact, innocent. Wonder what the difference between those men and Brett Kavanaugh is.