As has been widely reported, President Donald Trump contradicted his own staff's messaging on the Comey firing in an interview with NBC's Lester Holt, which was broadcast Thursday evening.
Nevertheless, his own staff stayed precisely on message, almost word-for-word, in the last 48 hours, which CNN's Anderson Cooper illustrated in the following mash-up of the administration's public statements on the matter.
"When he brought the recommendation to the president that the director of the FBI should be removed, president Trump provided a strong and decisive leadership the American people have come to be accustomed from him and he took the action necessary to remove director Comey," Vice President Mike Pence said.
"His deputy attorney general," Sarah Huckabee Sanders said next.
"Rod Rosenstein," Kellyanne Conway followed.
"Brought the recommendation to the president that the FBI director should be removed," Pence continued.
"...accordingly, the president accepted," Sanders went on.
"...the recommendation of the deputy attorney general," Conway followed.
"He provided strong leadership to act on the recommendation of the deputy attorney general," Pence said.
"He took the recommendation of Rod Rosenstein, deputy attorney general," Conway then said.
"He brought that recommendation to the president. I personally am grateful we have a president willing to provide the kind of decisive and strong leadership to take the recommendation of the deputy attorney general and the attorney general to remove an FBI director who had lost the confidence of the American people," Pence summarized.
Cooper noted that it was easy to splice all of those clips together because the words were almost exactly the same.
"You have somebody from the podium talking to reporters clearly thought out, had it on a piece of paper, this is what happened and it didn't happen that way," CNN's Gloria Borger said. "And nobody shared it with her. She was going to go out and talk to the American public, forget us. Talk to the American public. The vice president had the same talking points. We have to believe the vice president knew that the president was unhappy with Comey. I have to believe he was not in the dark on this, I don't think so. They went out there and gave the talking points about how this was Rod Rosenstein and now it turns out the president threw everyone under the bus."
Watch below:
Anderson Cooper hilariously nails word-for-word... by sarahburris
