The Briefing

by Sean Spicer

  Memes.

  They can make us laugh, and we all share them. However, the longer I was behind the podium, the more convinced I became that there is something deeply dysfunctional in the way our culture uses memes to elevate tiny details into national moments of outrage or ridicule that push aside any deeper consideration about policy and simple fairness.

  One internet meme featured spinach caught between my teeth while facing the press.

  Another showed my flag pin upside down on my suit lapel—after it had slipped—during a briefing.

  One (falsely) displayed me wearing different colored shoes. (I was wearing one brown shoe and one black medical boot.)

  A story in Politico falsely claimed that I was “butt tweeting” from the @PressSec Twitter handle, however, Politico failed to realize that the “butt tweet” in question was actually from an unverified, fake account, @Press5sec.

  Another story dug up a tweet about Dippin’ Dots I had posted years earlier.

  Mike Bender of the Wall Street Journal falsely accused me of taking a mini fridge from junior staffers.

  And, of course, there were the constant stories about my habit of chewing Orbit cinnamon gum. (Admittedly, I chewed a lot of gum, but not quite to the level the memes suggested.)

  Some memes were sweet. One, for example, captured a colorful, beaded bracelet that spelled out the word “DAD,” which my son had made for me and which I often wore behind my watch. (Melissa McCarthy even wore one on SNL.)

  Any person who stands in front of cameras day after day is going to have some detail, quirk, or imperfection that gets noticed and turned into a social media meme. It just comes with the territory. What bothered me, however, was how the memes made the briefings about me, not about the president and the administration’s policies. Some memes overshadowed the news. And in meme-world, truth and fiction can get blurry.

  Take @sean_spicier, a truly funny Twitter feed in which someone parodies not just me, but the Left, the Right, and everyone in between. For example, “Sean Spicier” tweeted, “Nothing at all to worry about, everyone! The people who said you can keep your doctor also say you can keep your guns.”

  Kurt Eichenwald, a New York Times writer turned author, took the bait, tweeting, “…and @seanspicer returns to hollow-headed, inflammatory fear mongering in his desperate attempt to seem enough of a propagandist to land a job at @FoxNews. Or anyplace where lies are cherished.” Eichenwald got my handle right in his attack of me, but he didn’t notice the difference. I may be Spicer, but I am not Spicier.

  My alleged quote got a lot of online attention, thanks to Eichenwald’s marketing, eliciting anger in the blogosphere and commentariat before a sheepish Eichenwald corrected it. But, like all good memes, the truth or correction will never get the attention that the original meme did.

  And I was about to become the subject of the mother of all memes.

  Around 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, May 9, 2017, I was called into the Oval Office. Nothing unusual there—it happened about five times a day. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and I arrived to find Reince, Stephen Miller, and several attorneys from the Office of White House Counsel standing near the two couches and chairs in front of the fireplace.

  “Hand Sean the copies,” the president ordered.

  One of the lawyers thrust copies of two letters at me. One was from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to the president; the other was a terse missive from Attorney General Jeff Sessions to the president. Both laid out the case of why FBI Director James Comey should be relieved of his duties.

  “We need to get this out,” the president said.

  The president’s advisers wanted to slow this process, and I agreed. Before we went public with this news, congressional leaders needed to be briefed. Our communications needed to prepare statements and talking points. We needed to line up allies to support us, and they needed to know our rationale.

  And, of course, James Comey needed to be notified privately that he was out of a job.

  The president acknowledged each point but kept coming back to “We need to get this out.”

  I suggested that the president should at least call the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and the Senate because I knew that one of the first questions I would get was whether the president had given a heads-up to Congress. I knew that, in addition to the decision itself, the story would also be about how we handled it. The president agreed to start making calls to the congressional leadership. Keith Schiller, the director of Oval Office Operations, was tasked with getting in a car and driving to FBI headquarters, a few blocks from the White House, to hand-deliver the letter that would fire Comey, who—as it turned out—was in California to give a speech for a diversity recruitment event.

  The conversation turned entirely toward process and away from why this was being done. The “why” was in the letters from Rosenstein and Sessions I held in my hands. The Rosenstein letter took Comey to task for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email scandal:

  The director was wrong to usurp the Attorney General’s authority on July 5, 2016, and announce his conclusion that the case should be closed without prosecution. It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement. At most, the Director should have said the FBI had completed its investigation and presented its findings to federal prosecutors. The Director now defends his decision by asserting that he believed Attorney General Loretta Lynch had a conflict. But the FBI Director is never empowered to supplant federal prosecutors and assume command of the Justice Department. . . . On July 5, however, the Director announced his own conclusions about the nation’s most sensitive criminal investigation, without the authorization of duly appointed Justice Department leaders.

  Compounding the error, the Director ignored another longstanding principle: we do not hold press conferences to release derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal investigation. Derogatory information sometimes is disclosed in the course of criminal investigations and prosecutions, but we never release it gratuitously. The Director laid out his version of the facts for the news media as if it were a closing argument, but without a trial. It is a textbook example of what federal prosecutors and agents are taught not to do.

  “Let’s go, let’s go—let’s get this done,” the president said.

  As Donald Trump spoke, Reince turned to me as if to intensify the command “Get it done now.”

  The decision was made; there was no second-guessing, no slowing this down.

  I took the two letters to the lower press office, a very small workspace adjacent to the Press Briefing Room where the deputy press secretaries, the assistant press secretaries, and the press assistants work under several television screens turned to various news channels. (It’s the room right behind the door where the press secretary enters the briefing room.)

  Turning the two letters into attachable, digital documents would be relatively easy to do from a home computer. But it was not so easy to do in the federal government, especially in the White House.

  One of the press assistants had to feed the two letters into a scanner and then send them to the government system, GovDelivery. The system had a maximum of one gigabyte of information that could be fed out as an attachment. When converted into PDFs, the DOJ letters were 1.01 gigabytes, one one-hundredth of a percent over the maximum allowed.

  We tried feeding the documents through the system in hopes of getting the files under that limit, but the system continued to say they were too large. Meanwhile, my phone kept ringing. Reince was now telling me sternly, “Get it out now.”

  The letters finally went through GovDelivery.

  The attorneys from the Office of White House Counsel had given me clear guidance on what to tell the press: this was a Department of Justice decision because the FBI director reports to the deputy attorney general, so the DOJ would take the lead on this—100 percent.

  I composed a short blurb announcing the firing, attached the two documents, and hit the “send” but
ton, igniting an instant wildfire that spread throughout the press, the networks, and the cable news stations. Within minutes, as the president flipped through the media coverage on television, he realized that the Comey firing was almost universally getting panned.

  Democrats, Republicans, reporters, and pundits were all questioning why this decision was made. Even Comey’s detractors wondered, why now?

  I got a call from Reince.

  “Where are our surrogates?”

  I wanted to say, “Oh, you mean all the surrogates I lined up during the few minutes of heads-up time you all gave me? You mean those surrogates?” But I knew he was just reacting to all the negative coverage—the reaction was just rolling downhill, and I was the guy squarely at the bottom of the hill.

  My team joined the Office of Legislative Affairs to call every Senate Republican to find out who was willing to go on a show that evening or the following morning.

  As I could have predicted would happen after people have been taken by surprise, we got a universal, 100-percent “no” from Republican senators.

  “Where are our people?” the president asked me over the phone. “What are we doing to get anyone out there?”

  We were now calling friendly members of the House and all our top surrogates outside of Congress.

  No one wanted to go on the record until he or she had time to evaluate the decision, and the few who were willing to appear on morning shows were turned down by show producers. Even the public affairs shop at the Department of Justice—which, according to the Office of White House Counsel, was responsible for talking to the press—was keeping the firing at arm’s length. They said they had no plans to make anyone available to the press. What? They claimed it was a tradition that the deputy attorney general never does television. Tradition? Really? Didn’t they get the memo that tradition was over and a fresh administration was creating new traditions?

  One thing was clear to me: had the president fired Comey in January, he would have been universally applauded. The FBI director’s bizarre handling of the Clinton email investigation was still a news story then, and the new administration would have been praised by some for cleaning house. But now everyone wanted to know about the timing and questioned what had happened to move Comey’s firing to the forefront.

  Our inability to answer those questions kept any potential ally from going on-air to offer support or an explanation for the firing.

  The president wanted us to counter the media’s criticism, so Kellyanne, Sarah, and I sat down and divvied up the networks. I took Fox Business, Kellyanne took CNN, and Sarah went to Fox News. Despite the Office of White House Counsel’s advice about the Department of Justice taking the lead, we recognized that the president was right—the White House had to say something. We could not continue to be silent on such an important matter. The critics were on every show, and we had no one—zero, nada—representing the president’s point of view.

  Every night at 9:00 p.m., the Secret Service closed the door between the briefing room and the press staff offices. Reporters, now unable to access our offices, had gone outside to “Pebble Beach” on the northwest corner of the White House driveway. Pebble Beach is now a paved area that is shaded by green awnings, but years ago it was covered in pebbles. It is still a prime work area for reporters doing live reports and interviews for networks and cable news; most television news reporting from the White House takes place there.

  I walked outside, stepped up to the lights, and did my part with Fox Business, doing an interview with Lou Dobbs. As I finished my interview, one of our press assistants, Janet Montesi, pointed to a huge gathering of reporters. I knew I had to say something to them.

  “Tell them I’ll be right there,” I said.

  I walked down a slate walkway to where the press corps had collected on the White House driveway, and I took a deep breath. For over ten minutes, I answered every question, hewing as closely to Rosenstein’s memo as I possibly could.

  Prior to beginning, I said to the reporters and their cameramen, “If you guys turn off your cameras, we can go into the Roosevelt Room, and I’ll give an interview to anyone who wants one.” I thought I was being “media friendly.” They had waited patiently and were doing their jobs. It was my job to make sure the president’s position was known. Since it was pitch dark, and we were standing in the middle of a driveway, I figured offering to bring all the camera crews into the Roosevelt Room, which had television lights, would make for a much better shot for their morning show reports.

  We wanted to make sure that everyone got an equal chance to have his or her questions answered. And true to our word, every network got its time. I thought we had done our job the best we could, considering the circumstances.

  I called the president to update him.

  Some of the interviews I had done would be held for the morning news shows. As luck would have it, I was due to report to the Navy for my reserve duty the following day at the Pentagon. I called the president to remind him. “I just want to make sure that’s okay, sir.”

  “Sarah will be here, right? She can handle it.”

  “Of course. She’s ready to go.”

  “No problem. Fine.”

  The next morning, I dressed in my uniform and scanned the Washington Post, in which reporter Jenna Johnson wrote that I had been hiding in the bushes before briefing the reporters who had assembled by Pebble Beach.

  There is a row of tall bushes on the perimeter between the slate path that leads to Pebble Beach and the driveway that goes to the West Wing of the White House. I was on the path the entire time, a very short path, maybe ten yards to the driveway. Not only had I never hidden from the press, I had gone out of my way to make myself available with a camera-friendly opportunity. A retrospective story about the Trump White House later included coverage of that night, showing very clearly where I was and where I wasn’t.

  The irony of Johnson’s report is that I could have completed that first round of interviews, walked back into the White House, and called it a night. But I knew the press was frustrated and wanted more, and I was intent on answering the questions of reporters who had stayed late. My reward for trying to be helpful to the press was Jenna Johnson inventing a whole-cloth untruth of me hiding in the bushes.

  It wasn’t until the afternoon that I found time to get away from my desk at the Pentagon to deal with Scott Wilson, the Washington Post editor who had overseen Johnson’s story. I told Scott it was not possible for me to have been in the bushes, and I sent him pictures of the event and area to prove it.

  So, the Washington Post ultimately relented and issued an “update”: “Spicer huddled with his staff among bushes near television sets on the White House grounds, not ‘in the bushes,’ as the story originally stated.”

  So, I was now “among bushes.” I guess you take what you can get.

  Does a guy looking to hide from the press go out on the White House driveway where the media gathers all the time? Several journalists, who were there, told me that what Johnson had done was wrong, but the meme had already been launched.

  I asked Lynn Sweet, the bureau chief of the Chicago Sun-Times, what she saw that night and she responded, “I saw a press guy looking to deal with a press scrum. I’m not sure how this got turned into hiding. From what I saw, you weren’t hiding from anybody. Even before this (the driveway), you were accommodating to the print press.”

  Of all the things to hit me on, the press picked the time I went out my way to be helpful, and it is now part of an indelible image of me. I could have given the scoop of the firing to a friendly outlet or let the letter stand or just let my comments on Lou Dobbs’s show stand, but I didn’t. I played it straight while Jenna Johnson clearly did not.

  I tried as best I could to put in my Navy drill day. Unlike the old recruiting commercials, it’s not always about a weekend a month and two weeks in the summer. In the modern-day reserves, many of us IMAs (Individual Mobilization Augmentees) are attached to an active-duty unit a
nd come in on weekdays to fill in for someone on leave or to work on a special project; in essence, we are support staff for an active unit or command.

  While I was sitting at my desk in the Pentagon, I heard that reporters were checking to confirm that I was really in the building and not off hiding somewhere.

  By midday, Facebook and Twitter were full of images of my head popping out from behind bushes. Then came the late-night hosts with their jokes and skits. Once again, I had become a story.

  It was easy for those pushing this meme to say that it was all in good fun. But most memes—and certainly this one—don’t emerge from a spirit of fun. They emerge from a spirit of malice and a desire to wound.

  While I was on duty at the Pentagon, Sarah had taken the podium with poise and confidence. By all accounts, she had done a strong job of fielding questions about the firing. The president was impressed. And, watching with one corner of my eye from my desk at the Pentagon, so was I.

  Some in the media appeared to fault me for reporting for Navy duty during those three days. Rebecca, who had received her first paycheck from CNN years ago, was watching CNN in her office that day. The lower-third “Breaking News” banner on the screen wasn’t about Comey. It was about me. “SPICER TO MISS PRESS BRIEFING DAY AFTER COMEY WAS FIRED,” the banner read. And the commentary from the pundits matched the banner. “[Y]ou’re a former White House correspondent, and so am I,” Wolf Blitzer said to David Gregory on-air. “I think it’s pretty extraordinary, though, for Sean Spicer to decide that he’s going to go forward with his routine Naval Reserve duty over at the Pentagon, at a time like this, instead of stepping up and doing this major briefing.” David Gregory responded to Blitzer, “But they don’t have a real concern about being accountable and giving the press corps answers.”

  Two things stood out about that exchange. The first was Wolf saying that it was odd for me to fulfill my Navy duty and suggesting that I had not “stepped up.” The second was David Gregory insinuating that the White House wasn’t being “accountable” even though the rest of the press team had been accessible that day and Sarah had conducted a full, on-camera briefing from the podium.