Former WH press secretary: I can’t imagine Obama ever asking me to lie for him

Former White House press secretary to President Obama Jay Carney said Wednesday that he “can’t imagine” Obama asking him to lie.

Carney made the comments in an interview with David Axelrod on his CNN-University of Chicago Institute of Politics podcast, “The Axe Files.”

“People ask me, ‘What did you do when your president asks you to say something wasn’t true?’ I said, ‘It never happened,’ ” Carney said. “It’s inconceivable to me that it ever would have happened.”

Carney and Axelrod specifically discussed the controversy at the beginning of President Trump’s term, when then-press secretary Sean Spicer lashed out at the media over the size of the crowd at Trump’s Inauguration Day ceremony.

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“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” Spicer said at the time, despite photos of the incident clearly showing a smaller crowd than at Obama’s 2009 inauguration.

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said in response that Spicer had been providing “alternative facts.”

Carney, who served as press secretary for just over three years, told Axelrod that the current press secretary position is “not a job I recognize.”

“If your credibility starts to erode, the president’s credibility starts to erode, the administration’s credibility, the country’s credibility,” he said.

Carney’s comments come just one week after departing White House communications director Hope Hicks admitted to the House Intelligence Committee that she sometimes tells white lies as part of her work for Trump.

She was the fourth communications director to leave in Trump’s first 13 months in office.