Sean Spicer just keeps killing his credibility

White House Spokesman Sean Spicer should have listened to Ari Fleischer. After Spicer's flagrant misstatement of Inauguration Day crowd figures over the weekend, Fleischer — a former White House press secretary trying to help the current one — offered some free advice. “As soon as a press secretary gets into statistics and facts, the press is going to fact-check the press secretary,” Fleischer said. “So don't use a fact, don't use a stat, unless you're 100 percent certain you've got it nailed down.” But, Spicer stood before reporters on Jan 24 and delivered this whopper, in defense of President Trump's bogus claim that massive voter fraud cost him the popular vote in November: “I think there's been studies. There was one that came out of Pew [in] 2008 that showed 14 percent of people who have voted were not citizens.”

It is hard to overstate what a brazen lie this was. I say “lie” — a loaded word that suggests Spicer knew he was telling a falsehood — because it is inconceivable that he believed it to be true. Trump has mischaracterized Pew's research on more than one occasion, and fact-checkers have crushed him for it. There is no way that Spicer, whose job requires him to obsess over media coverage, did not know that this absurd claim has been debunked.