Thread by @BlueHogReport

Oh…I have a new theory on #lecterngate that answers a few questions.

Assume your plan was never to buy an actual lectern, just to give Beckett money.

The second it gets noticed, you arrange for the “reimbursement,” thinking that will end the story. It doesn’t. 1/

You realize you’re going to have to prove the 8/9 “delivery” exists. But you have to do it quickly, because it’s 9/20ish and the story is not going away at all.

Now, recall that you’re both (a) stupid and (b) greedy. That’s important. 2/

If you’re spending your own money to keep up the cover story, you don’t *buy* a lectern.

You RENT the closest thing you can get to what a real one looks like, but that is also available more or less immediately. 3/

That lectern gets delivered to someone (or to the Capitol), you invite the D-G (& @MatthewrMoore) to come look at it so you can “prove” it’s real.

Pics get published in the paper, you assume that will end the “manufactured controversy,” you send the rental back. 4/

Except, those pics don’t end it, because the lectern you showed was obviously worth nowhere close to $19K. (I mean, just look at it.)

You try to gloss over this by mumbling something about “features.” That doesn’t help.

5/

But, because you rented it, you don’t have it around for photo-ops anymore or to be able to use to answer questions.

That’s why no one has seen it since.

That’s why you won’t tell anyone where it allegedly is now.

That’s why you can’t show us the “features.”

6/

That’s also why there are no documents showing the details of the alleged 8/9 delivery of the lectern. There was nothing delivered until you rented this stand-in.

The craziest thing, though, if this is accurate, is that it’s another unforced error by Sanders. 7/

The smart move, of course would have been to actually buy a similar (higher quality) lectern if this was the lie you were going with.

But that would cost more money, & you HATE spending your own money. There was no way to get the state to cover this, for obvious reasons. 8/

You’re your daddy’s girl, though. And you aren’t going to waste any of YOUR money covering up a lie that the people of Arkansas had the AUDACITY to question you about.

So an ill-conceived rental seems like the better option. 9/

Or…it seems like the better option IF you assume that all Arkansans are dumb enough to believe your obvious, unclever lies.

Hell, I’m sure that what the lackeys you’ve surrounded yourself with think (& what they keep telling you).

Because you mistake fealty for respect. 10/

So, I suppose, the biggest surprise of this entire #lecterngate fiasco might just be the moment thar Sarah Sanders, Alexa Henning, & a handful of other carpetbagging grifters learned that they aren’t quite as good at lying as they keep telling themselves they are. 11/

I don’t suspect they are capable of self-reflection, so the lesson won’t stick. That’s a shame.

Regardless of their growth, however, #lecterngate is another positive for the rest of us. It shot a huge hole in the Sarah Sanders hype train.

She has only herself to blame. End/

Wait! Post-script.

The question below just made me realize something else: the answer to “why did they pretend to buy a lectern instead of [insert easier way to funnel money]” has been staring us in the face the whole time!

It’s right there in this email on 5/11. “They wanted to use transition money for this purchase.”

Transition funds are set aside by the legislature in Gubernatorial election years for use by the incoming governor between inauguration & June 30 (end of fiscal year)

Those funds—which they wanted to use b/c, again, free money from someone else—couldn’t have been used to pay Beckett as a consultant. They couldn’t be used to pay Beckett to throw a big party (inaugural funds pay for the inaugural) & that would have defeated the purpose anyway…

Since paying Beckett for a party would have required, you know, *a party.*

But a lectern that you could theoretically use for all your “let them eat cake” proclamations?

You could totally use transition funds for that. Except for one minor detail…

The expenditure of those funds is managed by someone else (TSS, I believe), & as Sarah learned, you can’t pay for anything, even a lectern, out of *those* funds until the item is received.

If this really was a lectern purchase, that wouldn’t be a big deal.

As TSS explained, they could just get a purchase order, send that to the lecternmonger, & it would come out of the transition funds later, even after June 30, as long as it was ordered and the PO was created before June 30.

Easy peasy. But only if you want a lectern.

If, instead, you only want it to LOOK LIKE you were purchasing a lectern so you could give Virginia Beckett $19,029.25, “get a PO & they’ll get the money when they deliver the lectern” does nothing at all for you.

So you find yourself unable to use transition funds for your sham purchase & locked into your lie about having already ordered a lectern that just HAS to be paid for up front.

Your only other option in those circumstances is using a state credit card.

So the answer to why they did it this way, with the lectern, instead of some easier way is that they greedily wanted to use transition funds, but were too ignorant of the process to know that it wouldn’t work.

And the answer to why they used a credit card & incurred the $500+ CC charge is because they greedily wanted to use whatever state money they could, & this was literally the only way to do it that didn’t require a lectern to actually be delivered.

Right up until it did.

Hanlon’s razor says “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

The Huckasanders Corollary to that would be “Never attribute to accounting errors that which is adequately explained by ignorance and greed.”

As with much of this #lecterngate stuff, we only know what we know because of FOIA, which Sanders has already tried to gut & continues to thumb her nose at. If you’d like to help with the expense of fighting her and getting information: gofund.me/292a675c

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