White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah has confirmed that Sadler has left her job “within the Executive Office of the President,” but it remains unclear whether her departure was related to her imprudent remark on McCain’s terminal illness.
Some media reports suggest that Sadler was pushed out of her position because she had accused White House Strategic Communications Director Mercedes Schlapp of being the one who leaked her comments to the media.
Two unnamed sources told the Daily Beast that Sadler’s accusations made Schlapp furious, and shortly after a private staff meeting, she referred to her as a “b*tch.” Schlapp, however, denied the claims, saying that she has never used “that word to describe anyone on the White House staff.”
As the scandal has been in the limelight for nearly a month now, many social media users were relieved to learn that Sadler finally left her job:
Some didn’t understand what Raj Shah meant by saying that Sadler was “no longer employed within the Executive Office of the President”:
Others went with the version that while she was dismissed, it wasn’t for the insensitive barb:
Commenting on Sadler leaving her job, ex-White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci told CNN that “someone had it out for” her.
“Someone had it out for Kelly Sadler. Because that was a sorry joke. It’s an unforgivable statement – I’m not here suggesting the statement was OK – but what I am suggesting as someone that’s run a pretty decent corporation, that when you’re sitting inside the inner sanctum and somebody says something like that, to run outside the sanctum and rat on that person – I think that’s a terrible thing to do to the person,” he said.
Her comments came as McCain, who was diagnosed with late-stage brain cancer last year and lived through years of captivity during the Vietnam War, refused to vote for Haspel, emphasizing that she is not fit to lead the Central Intelligence Agency because of her “disturbing role on overseeing the use of torture by Americans.”
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Immediately after the incident, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders blasted the staff, with some alleging that she was more upset with the leak than the remark itself.