Former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders faced a tumultuous 23 months in the Trump administration, but she said in a recent interview that "I don’t like being called a liar."
"I was attacked for everything, not just my performance," Sanders, 37, who's now back in her native Arkansas, told The New York Times in an interview published Sunday. "I was called a fat soccer mom, my kids were threatened, my life was threatened. It was a lot.
"I hate harping on it, but to be in the position I'm in and to have Secret Service, that's not normal."
However, "I don’t like being called a liar," she told the newspaper. "The other stuff bothered me far less."
Sanders, who is weighing a run for Arkansas governor in 2023, had a contentious relationship with the press during her White House term — but it worsened after she acknowledged making a false statement about former FBI Director James Comey's firing by President Donald Trump in May 2017.
Sanders told reporters then that "countless" FBI agents lost confidence in Comey. She later admitted to Russia special counsel Robert Mueller's prosecutors that she made misstatements to the media, which she called a "slip of the tongue" at the time.
In an interview with the Times last year, Sanders said she tried to deliver the "best and most accurate information at the time that I can" as White House press secretary.
"One of the few things you have are your integrity and reputation," Sanders said at the time. "There's a difference between misspeaking or not knowing something than maliciously lying."
Sanders is the daughter of Mike Huckabee, who served as the state's Republican governor from 1996 to 2007 and who ran for president twice. Both he and President Trump have urged her to run when Gov. Asa Hutchinson's term ends in 2023.
"There are two types of people who run for office," Sanders told the Times. "People that are called and people that just want to be a senator or governor.
"I feel like I've been called."
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