The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
Trump condemns FBI leakers
White House bars journalists of some major news organisations from Saturday’s press briefing
PRESIDENT DONALD Trump turned the power of the White House against the news media Friday, escalating his attacks on journalists as “the enemy of the people” and berating members of his own FBI as “leakers” who he said were putting the nation at risk.
In a series of Twitter posts, he assailed the FBI as a dangerously porous agency, condemning unauthorised revelations of classified information from within its ranks and calling for an immediate hunt for leakers.
Hours after his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as if to demonstrate Trump’s determination to punish reporters whose coverage he dislikes, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, barred journalists from The New York Times and several other news organisations from attending his daily briefing, a highly unusual breach of relations between the White House and its press corps.
Trump’s barrage against the news media continued well into Friday night. “FAKE NEWS media knowingly doesn’t tell the truth,” he wrote on Twitter shortly after 10 p.m., singling out The Times and CNN. “A great danger to our country.”
The Trump White House has also vowed new efforts to punish leakers.
Trump’s attacks on the press came as the White House pushed back on a report by CNN on Thursday night that a White House official had asked the FBI to rebut a New York Times article last week detailing contacts between Trump’s associates and Russian intelligence officials. The report asserted that a senior White House official had called top leaders at the FBI to request that they contact reporters to dispute the Times’ account.
In the West Wing less than three hours later, the consequences were becoming clear. Spicer told a hand-picked group of reporters in a briefing in his spacious office that the White House would relentlessly counter coverage it considered inaccurate. “We’re going to aggressively push back,” he said, according to a recording of the session provided by a reporter who was allowed to attend. “We’re just not going to sit back and let, you know, false narratives, false stories, inaccurate facts get out there.”
Reporters from The Times, Buzzfeed News, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, the BBC and The Huffington Post were among those shut out of the briefing. Aides to Spicer admitted only reporters from a group of news organisations that, the White House said, had been previously confirmed.
Those organisations included Breitbart News, the One America News Network and The Washington Times, all with conservative leanings. Journalists from ABC, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and Fox News also attended.
Reporters from The Associated Press and Time magazine, who were set to be allowed in, chose not to attend the briefing in protest of the White House’s actions. The Washington Post did not send a reporter to the session.
The White House played down the drama surrounding Friday’s briefing.
“We invited the pool, so everyone was represented,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, deputy White House press secretary, said in an email Friday afternoon, referring to the small group of reporters on hand at the White House each day to follow the president and send reports to the broader press corps. “We decided to add a couple of additional people beyond the pool. Nothing more than that.”
Trump, in his criticism of the media, said, “A few days ago, I called the fake news the enemy of the people because they have no sources — they just make it up.” He added that his “enemy of the people” label applied only to “dishonest” reporters and editors. NYT