Article snippet: So the threat we have been waiting for — girding for — has finally arrived from the presidential level. “Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future ‘press briefings’ and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???” President Trump wrote on Twitter on Friday morning. It may be an idea whose time has come — at least until there’s an improvement in the truth and accuracy barometer in the White House briefing room. The president’s Twitter post almost certainly came in response to the assessments of his White House press team’s performance after his abrupt firing of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey. He could not have been thrilled with the cable news reviews, captured in the Axios and CNN “Reliable Sources” newsletters: “yawning credibility gap” (the former Obama White House press secretary Josh Earnest, Democrat); “systemic, nonstop lying” (the former McCain presidential campaign manager Steve Schmidt, Republican); and “I was never sent out to lie — if I had, I would have quit” (the former Bush White House communications adviser Nicolle Wallace, Republican). During the White House briefings that followed Mr. Comey’s ouster on Tuesday, verifiably accurate information was hard to come by and confusion reigned. Mr. Trump’s deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, laid out a sequence of events that unraveled like any seam I’ve ever tried to resew. The first version of events was crystal clear: “It’s real simple here,” Ms. Sanders said o... Link to the full article to read more
In Trump’s White House Press Briefings, No Degree of Accuracy Required - The New York Times
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