Sarah Sanders Admits She Made False Claim About Obama’s Black Employment Numbers

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders admitted in a Twitter post that she made a mistake after falsely declaring that President Donald Trump has created three times as many jobs for African-American workers as former President Barack Obama did.

On Wednesday, Sanders said that she had not spoken accurately, claiming her numbers “were correct, but the “time frame for Pres Obama wasn’t.”

In a White House briefing on Tuesday, Sanders replied to a question about wether Americans could be guaranteed that they would never hear a recording of the president saying the N-word — as former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman has suggested he has. Sanders said that she “can’t guarantee” the president has never used the N-word and directly shifted the conversation to minority employment records.

“This president, since he took office, in the year and a half that he’s been here, has created 700,000 new jobs for African-Americans,” Sanders incorrectly told the reporters. “When President Obama left after eight years in office — eight years in office — he had only created 195,000 jobs for African-Americans. President Trump in his first year and a half has already tripled what President Obama did in eight years.”

Sanders’s statement was false. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Obama created nearly three million jobs for African American workers while he was in office.  The White House Council of Economic Advisers took responsibility for the wrong figures and tweeted a clarification.

But the numbers still contain issues. The use of November as the start point is questionable given that the president had not yet taken office — Trump took office in January 2017. Second, the numbers lack the context that Obama took over during the depths of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. Trump, on the other hand, took over after nearly a decade into an economic recovery.

NBC News also reported on Tuesday that most of the employment gains for black people since the Great Recession occurred during the Obama administration.

Article by Steven Abendroth