Speaking for Myself

by Sarah Huckabee Sanders

  After their one-on-one meeting, President Trump and President Putin held a joint news conference, during which the president did not publicly challenge President Putin’s denial of interfering in the 2016 election. President Trump was blasted by the media and critics on the left and right. It was a missed opportunity to send an unmistakably clear message to Russia and other foreign adversaries not to interfere in our elections, but in the president’s view, he had already taken a much harder line against Russia than President Obama, and much like with President Xi in China, President Trump believed it was more productive to be diplomatic than confrontational in face-to-face meetings with foreign leaders.

  In many instances President Trump and leaders in the administration had acknowledged and condemned Russian election interference but none of that mattered to liberals. After all, in their minds, President Trump was a “Russian agent” and “traitor to his country,” despite no evidence to support these outrageous claims and plenty of evidence to the contrary. Senior Trump administration officials spent an inordinate amount of time and energy working to counter any threat of foreign interference in the 2018 election. Before a White House press briefing with FBI director Christopher Wray, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, and National Security Advisor John Bolton on the threat posed by Russia in the upcoming election, I ran the prep and murder-boarded all of the nation’s senior law enforcement and intelligence officials on questions they’d likely be asked at the briefing. Most of them didn’t seem thrilled that I was asking them such pointed questions in an aggressive manner, but I reminded them not to take it personally, that I was asking as if I was a reporter, not a colleague. Unlike the Obama administration, the Trump administration took a serious approach to election security. President Trump, of course, got no credit when the 2018 midterm election concluded without any significant foreign interference—only the blame for President Obama’s incompetent mismanagement of the Russian threat during the 2016 election.

  As the Mueller investigation was nearing an end, Emmet Flood, the attorney in the White House handling the Russia investigation, came by my office and told me he needed to see me. Emmet was a seasoned pro with experience handling high-stakes investigations in the Clinton and Bush administrations. He had a stoic face but an incredibly funny, dry sense of humor. Emmet and I had grown close working together over the last few months. I trusted him more than anyone else in the building to navigate the Mueller storm threatening us all. Given that I was constantly answering questions about the Mueller investigation and usually the first to know about breaking news surrounding it, we spent a good amount of time working together and briefing the president on the ongoing witch hunt. He regularly tried to water down my fiery statements while I reminded him we had to punch them up or they would never be approved by our boss. Although he was a good friend, I usually wasn’t thrilled when he wanted to see me because I knew it wouldn’t be good news. As he entered my office he had a look on his face that I knew meant something was up and he wasn’t looking forward to our conversation.

  He sat me down and told me that Mueller’s team wanted to interview me. He said I wasn’t required to do it and the decision to do so was mine. The only people in the building who knew about Mueller’s request were him and the president. I asked Emmet what the president thought I should do and he said the president wanted me to do it so long as I was comfortable with it. I asked Emmet for his recommendation and he said he thought I should do it as well. Their scope was narrow. They wanted to talk to me about four specific things and they wouldn’t be allowed to go into anything outside of those four areas. I told him I wanted to think about it and talk to my husband and the president. He agreed that was a good idea.

  I had heard horror stories of innocent people who had done nothing but work for the president and serve their country spending themselves into financial ruin on attorney’s fees. I knew we couldn’t take that on. We had three kids and were paying a lot on rent and childcare to live in one of America’s most expensive cities. A $100,000 legal bill would have been devastating to our family, but I also wanted to do my part, get the truth out, and defend the president. I didn’t want to worry Bryan either. I had been assigned Secret Service because of a specific, credible threat to my safety and the last thing we needed was the additional stress of a costly legal fight and to be thrust deeper into this frivolous investigation and become an even bigger target for the media and liberal mob.

  Emmet and I went to the back dining room off the Oval and he, the president, and I talked about what I should do. The president made clear it was my decision to make. He didn’t pressure me. I told him I was inclined to do it. He said make sure you have a good lawyer and assured me I wouldn’t be on the hook for legal expenses. Bryan agreed that it made more sense to be fully transparent than to avoid it and create the perception that I had something to hide. Emmet connected me with a prominent, well-respected Washington attorney named Bill Burck, who represented a few other senior administration officials and knew the Mueller investigation inside and out.

  I called Bill but he was out of the country and told me he’d call me back. I anxiously waited two days for him to get back to me and let me know the game plan. He said there were four areas to cover and we would need to do prep sessions to go over any material related to the topics. I had already turned over two notebooks that the investigators were going through. Bill told me they would build a briefing binder for me that included all the emails, statements, and notes on the four topic areas and drop it off at my house. A few days later a courier brought a two-inch-thick, three-ring, binder with sixty-seven tabs to my house, full of hundreds of pages to review. It was the size of a phone book. I tried to familiarize myself with the binder ahead of my in-person session but it was a lot of information to quickly digest.

  I made plans with Bill to go to his home and meet with his team on a Sunday afternoon so no one would see me coming and going from his office. I went to church with my family that morning and by late afternoon my binder and I were sitting in his living room at his home in Northwest Washington, DC. We spent hours going over questions and asking why I had made a particular statement; if someone had told me to say it and why; and whether I discussed a particular answer with the president directly. It was exhausting and frustrating trying to recall details of conversations that had taken place months ago that I’d considered insignificant at the time. Some of the conversations I just couldn’t remember at all and others I knew exactly how, when, and why I had said what I did. We covered everything we anticipated would come up and Bill and his team felt good about it. He assured me that I was not a subject of the investigation—nor was I a target—I was simply a source on events I had been involved in and I had nothing to worry about.

  The morning of my interview I came into the office like normal and went to my morning meetings. I told my assistant and others I was going to be out of pocket most of the day. I loaded into the Secret Service’s black SUV and we picked up Bill and his team on the back corner outside their office. We drove to a nondescript gray concrete government building like you’ll find on nearly any block in our nation’s capital. We went in through the back loading-dock entrance and rode an elevator to the floor where we’d spend the next several hours. We stepped off the elevator and walked down an empty hallway flooded with fluorescent lights to the interview room. The Secret Service agents with me took a seat in a drab lounge area just down the hall where they waited. The interview room was like a psych ward where patients aren’t allowed to have sharp objects or contact with the outside world. It had neutral white walls, a couple of tables, and government-issued chairs. There was nothing hanging on the walls and I hadn’t seen a ray of natural light since we entered the building. It was an unsettling place. We waited. Eventually Mueller’s team walked in and instructed me where to sit. Just before we got started Robert Mueller himself dropped by to say hello and thanked me for interviewing with them. I’d se
en hundreds of clips of him on TV and spoken his name thousands of times—and had that one awkward public encounter with him at Salt and Pepper restaurant in the Palisades—but this was the first time we had ever spoken to one another. He was smaller than I expected him to be, standing face-to-face with him. He was pleasant but wasn’t sticking around. As he made clear to the world in his disastrous congressional hearing, Mueller was just the “Republican” figurehead of a partisan investigation actually run by a bunch of angry Democratic prosecutors out to destroy the president and everyone associated with him.

  We took our seats and the interrogation began. Mueller’s team had barely finished introducing themselves before they started firing off questions. They quickly got frustrated at anything I couldn’t remember. It was evident the Democratic prosecutors had nothing but contempt for me and considered me no better than a common criminal from the moment they stepped in the room. Despite the fact I wasn’t a target nor a subject of their investigation they were arrogant, condescending, and laced every question with doubt. They made me feel guilty despite the fact I had voluntarily come to help them with an investigation I knew was nothing more than political vengeance from Democrats who couldn’t accept their defeat to President Trump.

  One of the areas Mueller’s team was most interested in was the firing of disgraced former FBI director Jim Comey, even though the president has the legal authority to hire or fire anyone he wants—for any reason. When I found out, how I found out, why I said what I said in the interview I did with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson after Comey’s firing. I remembered much of that night and told them all that I could. They asked questions about the famous statement from Don Jr. about his meeting with a Russian woman during the campaign. I was on Air Force One at the time, but wasn’t in the room when the statement was drafted. Still, they wanted to know about my comments in my briefing about Don Jr.’s statement. They wanted to know why I said what I did, who told me to say it, when they told me to say it, and whether or not I knew it to be true. They asked a lot of questions about whether or not the president was serious about firing Mueller and my response to this question during a gaggle aboard Air Force One on June 13, 2017, when I stated that “while the president has the right to, he has no intention to do so.” They asked me a hundred different ways if I had spoken to the president directly about this answer and at any other time after it. No matter the question, I gave as much information as possible and answered all of their questions patiently and honestly.

  The area where they really drilled down and were relentless was about an answer I gave during a press briefing regarding what we had heard from current and former members of the FBI. I stated in my briefing that along with the president and leaders in Congress, members of the FBI had also lost confidence in Director Comey. I said, “I had heard from countless members of the FBI and they were grateful and thankful for the president’s decision.” We spent a large amount of our nearly six hours together going over that particular statement, which had nothing to do with their investigation into whether or not there had been collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians to influence the 2016 election. Mueller’s prosecutors hammered me over the word “countless,” and I said my use of that particular word was a “slip of the tongue” made in the heat of a contentious briefing, but that I had in fact heard directly or indirectly from a number of current and former FBI agents who supported the president’s decision to fire Comey. Later the Mueller team totally misrepresented my statement to them in their official report for no apparent reason other than to vilify me. It was clear the main reason they’d called me in to do an interview had nothing to do with their investigation and everything to do with falsely attacking me in their report as payback for vigorously defending the president and fighting back against their witch hunt.

  It was late on a Wednesday evening when we got word that the Mueller team was about to issue their report to the Justice Department. I was already running late for dinner with my family and I texted my husband: “Don’t kill me, still at the office … Mueller report coming.” A few days later, Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and Emmet called me from Air Force One as the president was walking across the South Lawn to board Marine One and told me to get on the helicopter now and join the president for his trip to Florida. I called Bryan as I was walking to Marine One and told him not only was I not coming home that night, I was on my way to Florida. Emmet told me Mueller had issued his report to DOJ, and at Mar-a-Lago, I worked with the president, Emmet, and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone to coordinate our response. Attorney General Bill Barr announced that he might issue a summary report by the weekend and we soon learned there would be no more indictments.

  On Saturday the president golfed with Kid Rock at his club in Florida. In a great mood, he told me, “It’s like Election Day all over again—the pundits on TV don’t know what to say!”

  I returned to Washington early ahead of the president for the release of Attorney General Barr’s summary of the Mueller report. I went out for a quick ice-cream break with my husband and kids and then went to my office to coordinate the administration’s response. At 3:27 p.m. I got a call from the president. He was on speaker with Pat and Emmet and Mick and we finalized our statement. In the first public comment from the White House, I said, “The Special Counsel did not find any collusion and did not find any obstruction. AG Barr and DAG Rosenstein further determined there was no obstruction. The findings of the Department of Justice are a total and complete exoneration of the President of the United States.” I added: “A great day for America and for President Trump. After two years of wild anti-Trump hysteria, the president and his millions of supporters have been completely vindicated.”

  A few key decisions saved Trump’s presidency from the Mueller threat: the president opting not to fire Mueller, but allowing him to complete his investigation with full cooperation from the White House and campaign staff and no White House interference; hiring Pat Cipollone and Emmet Flood, both of whom were brilliant lawyers who effectively defended the president and aggressively and successfully pushed back on the president doing an interview with Mueller; and replacing Attorney General Sessions with Attorney General Barr, who had the experience and credibility to wrap up the investigation and communicate a summary of the report to the American people.

  Upon his arrival back at the White House on Marine One, the president said, “I just want to tell you that America is the greatest place on Earth. The greatest place on Earth. Thank you very much.”

  The president walked across the South Lawn and into the White House and told Scavino and me to join him in the private residence. We walked in to find the president’s legal team there and the room erupted in high-fives, hugging, and celebration. Hope texted me to let me know she was crying tears of joy in Los Angeles that the nightmare was finally over, and I shared her message with the president. He smiled and said, “We’ve all been through a lot together, but I’m so happy, so proud of the job each of you have done.”

  For more than two years Democrats and their liberal media allies had slandered President Trump as a traitor to his country for conspiring with Russia. It was all total BS—a malicious lie given wall-to-wall media coverage for two straight years. This should never again happen to an American president. But in that moment in the president’s residence of the White House we knew the witch hunt was over. Together we celebrated a triumphant victory over the forces who’d put us through hell for the sin of winning an election.

  9

  Working Mom

  On the eve of the 2018 midterm elections, I traveled with President Trump to three rallies in Ohio, Missouri, and Indiana. To my surprise President Trump called me up onstage in Indiana and asked me to say a few words.

  “A lot of people know me in my official capacity and it’s one of the greatest honors of my life to serve in your administration and one of the most important jobs I’ll ever have,” I said. “But the greatest job I’ll ever have and the most importan
t title I’ll ever have is that of a mom. And that’s why I work for the president: because I care about my kids’ future and our country’s future.” That might have sounded like a cliché but for me it was true. I loved my country and the opportunity to serve the president, but as a mom I hated the time I had to spend away from my kids at such a young age—time I could never get back. Other people could be the White House press secretary. I was the only person who could be mom to my three kids.

  Republicans lost the House in the midterm elections, but the president helped deliver a larger majority for Republicans in the Senate, including hard-fought wins against Democratic incumbents in Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, and Florida. The president also helped Republicans win governorships in key 2020 battleground states like Florida, Georgia, and Ohio. However, losing the House to the Democrats, led by San Francisco liberal Nancy Pelosi, was a major setback, and it exposed Republicans’ vulnerabilities in the suburbs, particularly among women.

  While many liberal feminists in the media attacked my appearance, character—even my fitness to be a mother—President Trump empowered me not just as a woman but as a working mom. It’s one of the things I appreciated most about the president, and I felt an obligation to share that with women across the country. When the president called me on weekends and evenings he frequently would wrap our calls by telling me to get back to taking care of my beautiful children, letting me know he understood I had other priorities and responsibilities. But most importantly, in the office he never treated me any different than any male employee. To me this was far more empowering than anything else he could have done. He included me in key high-level meetings—and not just to check the box and have a woman in the photo op. He frequently called on me to add my opinion to the discussion, which at times could be intimidating, like when he asked me to weigh in on a complex foreign policy issue in a meeting with a foreign leader or a life-or-death national security decision in the Situation Room.