Sarah Sanders tweets about leaving White House report

SHE has been one of US President Donald Trump’s closest, most prominent aides — and recently had a starring role in peace talks with North Korea.

But reports from the US now say that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is set to leave the White House.

CBS News reports that Sanders, 35, and Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah, 33, are both going to leave the Trump Administration.

The news surprised Sanders herself, who has tweeted: “Does @CBSNews know something I don’t about my plans and my future? I was at my daughter’s year-end Kindergarten event and they ran a story about my “plans to leave the WH” without even talking to me. I love my job and am honored to work for @PotUS.”

According to “sources inside the White House and close to the administration,” CBS reported that Sanders “has told friends that she plans to leave the administration at the end of the year.”

Sanders has had many tough moments at the podium, as she has continued to defend Trump from questions about his controversial presidency.

In May, she was seen choking back tears after she took a question from teenage student and budding reporter Benje Choucroun about gun control and school shootings.

“At my school, we recently had a lockdown drill,” the boy began. “One thing that affects mine and other students’ mental health is the worry about the fact that we or our friends could get shot at school.

“Specifically, can you tell me what the administration has done and will do to prevent these senseless tragedies?”

Sanders, a mother-of-three, was shaken, and told him: “I think that as a kid, and certainly as a parent, there is nothing that could be more terrifying for a kid to go to school and not feel safe. So I’m sorry that you feel that way. This administration takes it seriously. And the School Safety Commission that the President convened is meeting this week, again, an official meeting to discuss the best ways forward and how we can do every single thing within our power to protect kids in our schools and to make them feel safe and make their parents feel good about dropping them off.”

The network said Mr Shah also is considering an exit, but details of when he may leave are not confirmed.

Sanders has become a confidante of President Trump after his former communications director Hope Hicks resigned.

Sanders was given the role by Anthony Scaramucci, who only spent 11 days in the job before he was spectacularly dumped as White House communications director.

Before her, Sean Spicer was Trump’s first White House Press Secretary. Spicer resigned in protest in July last year after Scaramucci, a former Wall Street financier, was hired.

Spicer’s departure, first reported by The New York Times, had been coming.

He was previously the spokesman for the Republican National Committee. Spicer won the president’s approval after launching an aggressive defence of the president in a pre-inauguration press conference.

A day after Trump’s inauguration, Spicer tried to famously argue the crowd had been the largest in history. As he began to stumble through briefings, he buckled under pressure and was at the butt-end of jokes on Saturday Night Live where Melissa McCarthy played him.

He is gearing up to release a book at his time in the White House called The Briefing.

Indian-American Shah was appointed as the Principal Deputy Press Secretary in September last year. Shah joined the team as the Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of Communications for Research in January last year.

“There will be even more people leaving the White House sooner rather than later, laid off or just leaving out of exhaustion. And it is going to be harder to find good people to replace them,” a source close to the administration told CBS.

“I do think they’re going to have a harder time getting the second wave of people in than the first, because those people were loyalists, and [new] folks will have to be recruited and encouraged and then survive the vetting process. In addition to all of that, the president prefers to have a small communications staff.”

Sanders would be one of many staffers who have left the White House since Trump came to power.

Aside from Hope Hicks, these staffers have also left: Jared Kushner’s top communications aide, Josh Raffel homeland security adviser Tom Bossert; National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton; Trump’s personal aide John McEntee; director of White House message strategy Cliff Simms; communications aide Steven Cheung; congressional communications director Kaelan Dorr; assistant press secretary Natalie Strom; and deputy director of media affairs Tyler Ross.