White House deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders on Wednesday expressed surprise that Democrats are not celebrating President Donald Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey, who led the bureau’s investigation into election meddling.
“Frankly, I think it’s startling that Democrats aren’t celebrating this since they’ve been calling for it for so long,” Sanders said at the daily White House press briefing.
She said Comey made “a lot of missteps and mistakes” over the last year.
“Certainly I think that, as you’ve seen from many of the comments from Democrat members, including Sen. Schumer, they didn’t think he should be there,” Sanders said. “They thought he should be gone.”
Trump’s administration appeared wholly unprepared for the massive backlash following Comey’s surprise termination Tuesday night. White House press secretary Sean Spicer shouted a statement to reporters from his office door, which his staff then locked, and later spent several minutes hiding from cameras in shrubbery on the White House grounds before taking further questions.
The White House reportedly believed that Democrats’ previous criticism of Comey would insulate the decision from condemnation, but instead several Republicans joined the fray to question Trump’s decision.
As for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who Sanders cited as a Democratic lawmaker critical of Comey’s “missteps and mistakes,” he had some particularly pointed questions for Trump about Comey’s termination.
“Why now? Why did it happen today?” Schumer said on Tuesday. “Were these investigations getting too close to home for the President?”
