The White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is facing questions of credibility after Rudy Giuliani's stunning revelations about hush money paid to a porn star by President Donald Trump's lawyer.

Sanders on Thursday had to acknowledge that Giuliani hadn't given her a heads-up that he would disclose that Trump had reimbursed Cohen.

She said she didn't know about the reimbursement at all until Giuliani's interview on Fox News on Wednesday night.

"Were you lying to us at the time? Or were you in the dark?" one reporter asked Sanders.



WASHINGTON — The White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is facing a barrage of questions about whether she purposely misled the American people amid fallout over Rudy Giuliani's stunning revelation about hush money paid by President Donald Trump's lawyer to a porn star who alleges a tryst with Trump.

"Again, I gave you the best information that I had," Sanders repeatedly said Thursday in response to questions about why the White House did not disclose that Trump had reimbursed Michael Cohen, his longtime lawyer, for the $130,000 payment to keep Stormy Daniels quiet.

"Were you lying to us at the time? Or were you in the dark?" one reporter asked.

It was an awkward position for Sanders, who is tasked with speaking on behalf of the American president. It also highlighted the difficulty the White House's communications office has had in navigating an unpredictable and free-wheeling president.

"As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!" Trump tweeted last year.

Sanders on Thursday had to acknowledge that Giuliani hadn't given her a heads-up that he would disclose that Trump had reimbursed Cohen. She said she didn't know about the reimbursement at all until Giuliani's interview on Fox News on Wednesday night.

"I'm not part of the legal team and wouldn't be part of those discussions," she said when asked whether she'd been caught off guard.

It was an omission by design.

Giuliani told CNN on Thursday that White House staffers were indeed caught off guard.

"There was no way they wouldn't be," Giuliani said. "The president is my client. I don't talk to them."

Jason Miller, who has worked for Trump and Giuliani and remains in close touch with both teams, said White House staffers shouldn't have to deal with issues like Cohen and the special counsel's investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 US election.

"Finally, for the first time, there's now an external operation that's handling such matters," he said, describing the model as similar to the one developed as President Bill Clinton faced impeachment hearings over his cover-up of an affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

During that time, the Clinton administration developed a crisis-communications team to respond to reporters' inquiries about the scandal so that regular press staffers could focus on business as usual.

But former Clinton staffers say their model was very different from the one on display this week with Trump.

Joe Lockhart, the White House press secretary from 1998 to 2000, said the separation proved effective, but only because both sides were in constant communication.

"It was actually very hugely coordinated," he said, recalling that he spent almost as much time meeting with members of the legal team as he did political aides.

"It really was the only way you could effectively communicate, when you knew what everyone was doing," he said. "There wasn't a communication strategy and a lawyers' strategy. There was one strategy: a political strategy."

Michael McCurry, who was the press secretary from 1994 to 1998, said that while there were significant disagreements between lawyers and communication and political staffers who came to the table with different priorities and concerns, the group was committed to working as a team.

"I think it was very critical to helping President Clinton get through a difficult period," he said. "It was a very, very delicate balance" that required "a lot of goodwill and camaraderie."

Sanders, meanwhile, was forced to defend her credibility, a week after the comedian Michelle Wolf created an uproar at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner with jokes about the press secretary, including one that Sanders "burns facts" and "uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye."

"Like maybe she's born with it, maybe it's lies," Wolf said. "It's probably lies."

Some who saw the routine said Wolf went too far.

On Thursday, Sanders took issue with a reporter's characterization that she had felt blindsided by Giuliani's interview.

"With all due respect, you actually don't know much about me in terms of what I feel and what I don't," she said.

Lockhart said that often the hardest part of the job is "standing up there and looking like you don't know what you're doing."

"But understanding that just getting through the day and getting through the week is the best thing you can do," he said.