Article snippet: New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt on Friday defended his impromptu interview with MORE against backlash from readers who said he should have pressed the president harder. “Some readers criticized my approach, saying I should have asked more follow-up questions,” Schmidt wrote in the Times’ “Insider” section. “I believed it was more important to continue to allow the president to speak and let people make their own judgments about his statements.” Schmidt’s interview with Trump at his Florida golf course made headlines Friday, as it was unplanned and unsupervised. In the interview, Trump said he had the “absolute right” to do whatever he wants with the Justice Department, and also said that he thought Special Counsel MORE would be “fair” to him in the investigation into whether his campaign colluded with Russia. He also repeated at least 15 times during the interview that there was “no collusion” between the campaign and Russia. "It is unusual to land an interview with the president, but even more rare for a reporter to get him one-on-one,” Schmidt wrote. “I knew that what I was doing was not going to go over well with the White House press office, which hates being blindsided by the president making news. But for much of the next half-hour, Mr. Trump and I sat alone.” One fellow journalist raising doubts about Schmidt's approach was Nate Silver, editor of the blog FiveThirtyEight, which was previously under the Times' umbrella. He posted on Twitter that th... Link to the full article to read more