Sarah Sanders Shares ‘Mueller Madness’ Bracket of ‘Trump Haters’ on Official Government Account

The world’s most embarrassing victory tour continued Monday night.

One day after Attorney General William Barr released his summary of Robert Mueller’s report on whether Donald Trump colluded with Russia in 2016, the president’s defenders were all over the airwaves and the Internet crowing about what they believe is a positive result.

Chief among them was press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Not content with being wrong on about the definition of the word “exoneration” during a national television interview on Monday morning, Sanders shared this graphic with her 3.8 million Twitter followers that night:

Mueller Madness! Which of the angry and hysterical @realDonaldTrump haters got it most embarrassingly wrong? #YouDecide pic.twitter.com/IkzUesDdub

— Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) March 26, 2019

The graphic comes from the New York Post, the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid supportive of Donald Trump. Included in the brackets are comedians and journalists who have been covering the Russia story for the past two years.

To say the triumphalism on display from Sanders is premature would be understating the case. The full Mueller report has yet to be released to the public. All we have seen is a four-page summary, written by Trump’s hand-picked attorney general who was publicly skeptical of the investigation before he was appointed. The summary says only that Trump and his campaign did not collude with the Russians on their social media influence campaigns. We do not yet know if Mueller reached conclusions about other questions, such as whether Russia and Trump had any sort of quid pro quo agreement to trade sanctions relief for the right to build Trump Tower Moscow.

The summary also states that Mueller could not reach a conclusion as to whether the president obstructed justice during the probe. That is less than the complete “exoneration” Trump and his supporters have been claiming.

Trump’s defenders are undertaking this victory tour even while Mitch McConnell is blocking nonbinding Senate resolutions calling for the release of the full report from Mueller. That would seem to undercut their claims of vindication just a bit.