'He has an audience of one’: Dana Bash slams Sean Spicer for lying about Manafort because Trump is watching

CNN’s Dana Bash on Monday slammed Sean Spicer for his claim that Paul Manafort—former chairman for Donald Trump’s campaign—actually “played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time” in then candidate-Trump’s presidential effort.

“It’s hard to find words to describe the way that Sean Spicer, frankly, is kind of forced to put his head so far into the sand,” Bash told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer during a segment on “The Situation Room.”

“Anybody watching it with any modicum of understanding of what’s going on thinks, ‘Is this guy kidding me?’” she added.

Bash said Spicer “has to say” the many untruths he spoke at Monday’s press conference, “because he knows that he has an audience of one, the President of the United States, at this point, that’s really his focus—It’s pretty obvious.”

“It didn’t make any sense on its face,” Bash said of Spicer’s claim. “There are certainly lots of questions about whether Paul Manafort was effective, whether he knew what he was doing. He didn’t last all that long, he was there for about three months. But there’s no question he had a significant role. He was chairman of the campaign for three months.”

“It’s hard to imagine that Sean Spicer could say that with a straight face,” she argued.

Earlier in the segment, CNN’s foreign correspondent Clarissa Ward spelled out exactly why Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interference with the 2016 election matters, pointing out there’s “no indication that [Putin’s] backing down, because there’s no indication how you take him to task for doing this.”

“He’s engaging in something called ‘hybrid warfare,’ and because he has the elements surprise, it allows him to sit on the world stage and play high-stakes poker, and have a pair of fives, and still win round after round after round because nobody knows if he’s bluffing not,” Ward said.

Watch the video below, via CNN: