The first question Press Secretary Sarah Sanders fielded during Wednesday’s White House briefing was about a comment from President Trump just hours earlier.

During a press event that took place shortly before the briefing, a reporter asked Trump, “Is Russia still targeting the U.S.? Is Russia still targeting the U.S., Mr. President?”

“Thank you very much, no,” Trump replied.

“No, you don’t believe that to be the case?” the reporter followed up.

“No,” Trump said, before he spent about a minute answering other questions reporters asked him.

Trump’s comment was odd, coming just days after Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats singled out Russia as one of the “worst offenders” of politically motivated hacks against the United States. Coats went as far as to compare the risks America faces from cyberattacks to the September 11 attacks that killed more than 3,000 people.

“It was in the months prior to September 2001 when, according to then-CIA Director George Tenet, the system is blinking red. And here we are nearly two decades later, and I’m here to say, the warning lights are blinking red again,” Coats said, during a speech to a D.C. think tank.


Coats isn’t alone — Trump’s own intelligence officials have repeatedly sounded the alarm that not enough is being done to prevent Russia from repeating the hacking and disinformation campaigns they used to help Trump get elected in 2016.

So a couple hours after Trump’s remark, Sanders was asked to explain the disconnect between what the president said on one hand, and what his director of national intelligence said on the other. She responded with an implausible explanation.

“I had a chance to speak with the president after his comments, and the president said ‘thank you very much,’ and was saying no to answering questions,” Sanders said. “The president and his administration are working very hard to make sure that Russia is unable to meddle in our elections as they have done in the past and as we have stated.”

But Sanders’ explanation makes no sense. If Trump was really saying “no” to answering questions in general, and not in response to the specific question the reporter asked him about Russia, then why did he spend the next block of time answering questions from reporters?


Sanders’ comments marked the second time in as many days the Trump White House tried to clean up ill-advised remarks Trump made about Russia with implausible explanations.

On Tuesday, Trump tried to explain away his widely-criticized defense of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denials of involvement in election interference by claiming that he actually meant the exact opposite of what he said.

In Trump’s initial comments about the matter on Monday, he said, “President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this — I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

But on Tuesday, Trump tried to shift the story.

“I reviewed a clip of an answer that I gave, and I realize there is a need for some clarification,” Trump said. “In a key sentence in my remarks I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t.’ The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason I wouldn’t, or why it wouldn’t be Russia.’”

During that same Tuesday event, Trump also tried to walk back comments he made while standing alongside Putin in Helsinki that indicated he believes Putin’s denials of Russian election interference above the consensus conclusion of his own intelligence community.

But that attempt to soften those comments didn’t make much sense, either.

After the president said that “I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place,” he immediately indicated he was lying.

“It could be other people also,” Trump said. “There’s a lot of people out there.”

The U.S. intelligence community’s consensus assessment of Russia’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 election is unequivocal. It doesn’t say anything about “people out there” playing a role in the online disinformation campaign that special counsel Robert Mueller has already indicted more than two dozen Russian government agents in connection with.