Sarah Isgur, who served as the Justice Department’s leading spokeswoman under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is joining CNN as a political editor in March. | Mario Tama/Getty Images Media Ex-Sessions spokeswoman to join CNN as political editor Sarah Isgur will coordinate political coverage for the 2020 campaign at the network.

President Donald Trump has derided CNN as a leading purveyor of “fake news,” and now, a recently departed administration official is joining the network in a senior role.

Sarah Isgur, who served as the Justice Department’s lead spokeswoman under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is joining the network as a political editor next month, where she will coordinate political coverage for the 2020 campaign.


Isgur joined the administration in 2017 after overcoming resistance from the president, who balked at bringing on a political operative who had trashed him on the campaign trail. As deputy campaign manager for Carly Fiorina’s presidential campaign, and in the months after Fiorina bowed out of the race, Isgur laced into Trump.

“Saying you will criminally prosecute your political opponent when you win is a scary and dangerous threat,” she wrote on Twitter in October 2016, in reference to Trump’s repeated threats to jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

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Isgur, who did not respond to a request for comment on this story, was equally critical of Clinton during the campaign.

While it is common for departing administration officials to join cable news networks as analysts or contributors, it is less common for them to oversee news coverage. Isgur has no experience in news but a long history as a political operative, most recently with the Trump administration and the Fiorina campaign. Before that, she worked for the Republican National Committee and on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, according to her LinkedIn profile. She began working with Sessions before his confirmation hearing, guiding him through the process and preparing him with mock hearings.

At CNN, Isgur will not play a role in covering the Department of Justice, according to a CNN official, who said she will occasionally appear on air analyzing politics.

After Sessions recused himself from overseeing special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe in March 2017, causing an irreparable rupture in his relationship with the president, Isgur took on an awkward role inside the administration. She served not only as Sessions’ public defender in the face of news reports that the president was routinely deriding him, but also as the spokeswoman for Sessions’ deputy, Rod Rosenstein, who assumed ownership of the Mueller probe and has had a similarly tense relationship with the commander in chief.

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Isgur’s discussions with the network have sparked a whisper campaign among Trump supporters who are arguing — without evidence — that she was the source of damaging leaks against the administration.

The president’s latest clash with CNN came on Friday when he dismissed a question from CNN’s chief political correspondent, Jim Acosta, calling it “a very political question.”

“You have an agenda, you’re fake news, you have an agenda,” Trump said.

Disclosure: Eliana Johnson is a political analyst at CNN.