Former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a new interview that she does not “like being called a liar.”
Speaking to The New York Times, Sanders recalled some of the attacks and criticism she faced while working in the Trump administration.
{mosads}“I was attacked for everything, not just my performance,” she said in an article published Sunday. “I was called a fat soccer mom, my kids were threatened, my life was threatened. It was a lot. I hate harping on it, but to be in the position I’m in and to have Secret Service, that’s not normal.”
But Sanders, who left the Trump administration over the summer, said all of that “bothered” her “far less” than being called a liar.
“I don’t like being called a liar,” she told the paper.
Sanders, who had a contentious relationship with the press during her tenure at the Trump White House, captured national headlines last year after she acknowledged making a false statement about former FBI Director James Comey’s firing by President Trump.
Sanders had told reporters that “countless” FBI agents lost confidence in the former FBI director. She later admitted to former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team that she made misstatements to the press, which she called then a “slip of the tongue.”
In an interview with the Times last year, Sanders said she tried to deliver the “best and most accurate information at the time that I can” in her role with the Trump administration.
“One of the few things you have are your integrity and reputation,” Sanders, who was once fact-checked live by CNN during a press briefing, said at the time. “There’s a difference between misspeaking or not knowing something than maliciously lying.”
Last December, Sanders said she hopes to be remembered as being “transparent and honest” in her legacy as a White House press secretary.
“I hope that it will be that I showed up every day and I did the very best job that I could to put forward the president’s message,” she said, “to do the best job that I could to answer questions.”