It’s no secret that veteran White House correspondent April Ryan and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders don’t have the most collegial of relationships, and now Ryan has vociferously called for Huckabee Sanders’ resignation.
“When there is a lack of credibility there, you have to start and start lopping the heads off. It’s ‘Fire Me Thursday’ or ‘Fire Me Good Friday,’ she needs to go,” Ryan said Thursday on CNN as part of a panel of pundits discussing the aftermath of the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Back in the day, before Huckabee Sanders abruptly stopped holding regular press briefings as Donald Trump’s mouthpiece, Huckabee Sanders often seemed, er, confounded by the pushback she would receive from the journalists in the room on the lies tales spin she’d provide on any number of Trump talking points. She often seemed particularly vexed by Ryan’s pointed questioning.
Then, on Thursday, the long-awaited Mueller report was released. Among the gems: the lies Huckabee Sanders admitted to Mueller’s team that she had told as press secretary.
The false statements that drew the Mueller team’s attention were made in May 2017, when Sanders sought to defend Trump’s firing of [FBI Director James] Comey.
On May 10, when a reporter pushed back on Sanders’ claim that “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director,” and quoted an FBI special agent who said “the vast majority of the bureau is in favor of Director Comey,” she said “Look, we’ve heard from countless members of the FBI that say very different things.”
The Mueller report indicates that Huckabee Sanders admitted she made up that statement and another related one.
In a CNN roundtable of journalists and pundits Thursday night, Ryan said the time had come for Huckabee Sanders to go.
As the Hill reported the exchange:
“Not only does she not have any credibility left, she lied,” Ryan told CNN anchor Erin Burnett. “She outright lied and the people, the American people, can’t trust her. They can’t trust what’s said from the president’s mouthpiece, spokesperson, from the people’s house.”
“Therefore, she should be let go. She should be fired. End of story,” said Ryan, who is also a National Urban Radio White House correspondent.
“When there is a lack of credibility there, you have to start and start lopping the heads off. It’s ‘Fire Me Thursday’ or ‘Fire Me Good Friday.’ She needs to go.”
Ryan is not the only prominent journalist to call for Huckabee Sanders’ ouster ...
... but Ryan certainly got the party started.