Politics - News Analysis Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Loser Brother Once Hanged a Dog — And Her Family Tried To Cover It Up

Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ brother, David Huckabee, once hanged a dog at camp when he was 17. His father, then Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, tried mightily to squelch the news by pressuring law enforcement, but multiple accounts emerged that David was involved in the dog’s death.

I thought everybody knew this story and some of you may, but a well-informed person I spoke with recently had no idea, so I thought I’d better get the news out there because it’s hard to understand Donald Trump’s press secretary’s moral compass without understanding something about her family.

The story begins when Mike Huckabee’s youngest son David was 17 and working as a counselor at Camp Pioneer in Hatfield, Arkansas, in 1998. One day, David Huckabee and a 19-year-old fellow counselor named Clayton Frady came across a stray dog. The pair of young men captured the dog, and then killed the dog. As a result, both David Huckabee and Clayton Frady were relieved of their duties as camp counselors.

Neither man has commented on the dog’s death in the intervening years, but the fathers of the boys have told different stories about what happened. Huckabee says the dog was killed because it was mangy and in bad health (a weird explanation, as most humans’ response to seeing a dog with mange wouldn’t be to kill it), and Frady’s father says that the dog was already being tortured by other boys at the camp, and David and Clayton simply put the dog out of its misery.

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Huckabee’s father was governor at the time, and guess what he did?

According to Newsweek, rather than forcing his sociopathic chip off the old block to face legal ramifications for killing a dog because the spirit moved him, a law enforcement official who worked on the case says then-Governor Huckabee intervened with attempts to investigate the dog’s death.

But John Bailey, then the director of Arkansas’s state police, tells NEWSWEEK that Governor Huckabee’s chief of staff and personal lawyer both leaned on him to write a letter officially denying the local prosecutor’s request. Bailey, a career officer who had been appointed chief by Huckabee’s Democratic predecessor, said he viewed the lawyer’s intervention as improper and terminated the conversation. Seven months later, he was called into Huckabee’s office and fired. “I’ve lost confidence in your ability to do your job,” Bailey says Huckabee told him. One reason Huckabee cited was “I couldn’t get you to help me with my son when I had that problem,” according to Bailey. “Without question, [Huckabee] was making a conscious attempt to keep the state police from investigating his son,” says I. C. Smith, the former FBI chief in Little Rock, who worked closely with Bailey and called him a “courageous” and “very solid” professional.

For nearly 10 years, news of David Huckabee went silent as the teen headed off to school at Arkansas State University to study political science.

Then in late 2007, shortly after his father had launched his initial presidential bid, the governor’s son popped up on the radar once more in less-than-desirable circumstances. Police reports indicated that the then-26-year-old David was arrested in a Little Rock, Arkansas, airport as he attempted to board a plane carrying a loaded Glock pistol, which the younger Huckabee claimed he had forgotten was in his suitcase.

“[It was a] silly mistake,” David said in a statement following his release from jail later that day. “It shouldn’t affect [my father’s presidential campaign].” He later served 10 days of community service for the incident.

And his sister is now the spokeswoman for the President of the United States.