Sean Spicer Returns to Try to Repair His Credibility. Fails.

‘At No Time Did I Say Things That Were Demonstrably False Intentionally’ Spicer Claims

Sean Spicer‘s short tenure as White House Press Secretary began with questionably false statements about the size of the crowd one day earlier at Donald Trump’s inauguration. Spicer infamously barked at reporters, “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.”

In an exceptionally lengthy investigation at the time USA Today concluded, “Trump and Spicer argued that the media misrepresented the size of the crowd at the inauguration, and we don’t find any evidence of that. To the contrary, it was Trump and Spicer who provided false information to feed a false narrative about crowd size.”

The Atlantic reported, “Trump’s Press Secretary Falsely Claims: ‘Largest Audience Ever to Witness an Inauguration, Period’,” and added, “In his first official White House briefing, Sean Spicer blasted journalists for ‘deliberately false reporting,’ and made categorical claims about crowd-size at odds with the available evidence.”

Almost a full year later and six months after ending his stint as press secretary, Spicer has returned, trying to salvage his credibility and reputation.

In an interview with S.E. Cupp on HLN Thursday afternoon, he failed. Miserably.

Here’s how Spicer defended his first-ever press briefing as Trump’s press secretary: By claiming Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist in previous administrations (they did,) and saying they “focused too much on the pictures” of the inauguration. And when confronted with having claimed he said Trump had the most Electoral College votes since Reagan, he dodged.

It was an embarrassing performance.

But it gets worse.

Here’s the opening segment of his interview:

“Did you lie on behalf of the President?” S.E. Cupp asked.

“No,” Spicer answered definitively.

Cupp sounded like she winced.

“You said a number of demonstrably proven false things, inaccurate things, while you were press secretary,” she accused. “Can you admit you said some things that were not true?”

In short, Spicer could not admit it.

“At no time did I say things that were demonstrably false intentionally.”

Face checkers (see above) disagree.

He blamed “an intensity, a scrutiny that has never been seen before in a White House.”

That’s because from day one Trump lied. And his team lied. Almost everyone associated with the Trump campaign, it seemed, lied. So of course the press scrutinized everything, or tried to. That’s their job, and Spicer knows that.

Spicer also claimed his job is to provide information the president wants communicated. But – and this is a devastatingly cancerous problem with the Trump administration, then and now: rarely does any public facing official in the Trump administration demonstrate they are aware they responsible to the public. Answering questions from reporters, and following up with answers when they don’t have them, appears to be unimportant. From Trump on down, ignoring questions or dodging them looks like “job one.”

His response makes that even clearer.

Spicer admitted he “screwed up,” but he just couldn’t admit the damage he did to the public’s trust in the White House – any White House. 

Whatever party takes over the White House after Trump, the damage, the destroyed trust Spicer began, will take years to fix.

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