by Jim Acosta
“I think we heard some alternative facts there,” I told Sesno. Later on, I made it clear where I stood (and stand now, as you are reading this): “They can throw us out of the White House, they can kick us down the street. We’ll set up our trucks on Pennsylvania Avenue, we’ll do the exact same stories every day,” I told the crowd. “It does not matter what they do because we’re here to do our job.”
Getting back to Spicer, he did note, accurately, during the GWU event that I was still getting a chance to ask questions at the daily White House briefings. That was true at the time. And Sean and I had some good battles in the Briefing Room. Yes, they got messy, and yes, they got personal—although, I should point out that it was Spicer who initially made things personal.
No White House official, Democrat or Republican, really wants to hear a reporter questioning what he or she is doing. Press secretaries from both parties have a job to do. They want to get the president’s message out, largely unchallenged. But what has been lost on some of Trump’s defenders, both inside and outside the White House, is that the press has an essential task as well. When we interrupt or try to poke at certain vulnerabilities in a press secretary’s argument, it’s for the purpose of ferreting out information that may well be vital to the American people. When journalists dig and talk to sources, who in some cases will disclose what they know only anonymously, it’s not for the purpose of behaving as political activists, as so many critics have alleged. It’s to find the truth. So, call me a showboater or a grandstander or “fake news.” I will go to my grave convinced deep down in my bones that journalists are performing a public service for the good of the country. The country is better off with reporters in the White House Briefing Room asking the hard questions, even if we sometimes sound a little over the top. That noise is the sound that a healthy, functioning democracy makes.
Part of the problem we have run up against as reporters in the age of Trump is that we have to serve as fact-checkers in real time. Because Trump sometimes begins the day with untrue or unfounded claims on Twitter, journalists must spend much of their time setting the record straight. That process is necessary, as tedious and as frustrating as our pushback might be to ardent Trump supporters. Picture a world where the American president gets to say whatever he wants and isn’t fact-checked. I’m here to tell you that other societies have tried out that way of government, typically in the form of dictatorships where the rights of the free press are crushed and where citizens must accept what they’re told or else. It may sound quaint, but when it comes to the federal government, if the taxpayers are footing the bill, they deserve to know they are getting their money’s worth. With that mind-set, we in the news media have no alternative but to ask the tough questions when covering the White House, especially when the president displays a total disregard for the essential role of a strong, free press.
Given his years of experience in Washington, Spicer should have known all this. But if he understood it, he certainly didn’t show it. At the briefings, he demonstrated a clear bias for conservative media. Rather than call on the Associated Press or another wire service first, as so many of his predecessors over the years had done, he would turn to Fox News to open the sessions, before moving around the room, ping-ponging from members of the conservative media to journalists representing more traditional news outlets. A senior administration official told me that the press shop had a strategy for calling on reporters in the Briefing Room. “Stick to the middle” was the mantra. If you look at the Briefing Room seating chart, you will find more folks from conservative media sitting in the middle seats, while more aggressive reporters, from CNN and NBC, are on either side. Spicer had plenty of GOP-friendly outlets to call on. For all the talk of the “liberal media,” consider the sheer number of conservative news sites that regularly sent reporters to the briefings: Fox News, Fox Business, the Daily Caller, Breitbart, One America News Network, Newsmax, and the Christian Broadcasting Network are just some examples.
Trump, too, showed a clear preference for calling on conservative news outlets, for example, at his joint news conferences with foreign leaders at the White House. This had a major influence on the information coming out of these events. Typically, these joint news conferences feature two questions from U.S. reporters and two questions from members of the press corps attached to that visiting leader (“2+2s” we call them). If Trump could count on receiving softball questions, particularly those that steered clear of the Russia investigation, he could control the message.
My guess is that, today, Spicer realizes he had made some mistakes, and to be fair, he was dealt a terrible hand. He had been forced to defend so many of Trump’s falsehoods—hell, let’s just call them what they are: lies—that he was rarely on offense in the Briefing Room. At each briefing, invariably one of the first questions to come up would be about one of the president’s ridiculous statements.
Consider Trump’s claim, made shortly after he won the election, that millions of undocumented people had voted illegally. This was his excuse for having lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, a nagging sore point for Trump, who can’t stand the fact that he finished the race with three million fewer votes than those cast for the Democratic Party’s nominee. Trump repeated this claim once again in a meeting with lawmakers at the White House, on the Monday after he was sworn into office. It was clearly still on his mind. The next day, January 24, at the White House briefing, to support Trump’s voter fraud claim, Spicer trotted out a study that didn’t exist.
“There’s one that came out of Pew in 2008 that showed 14 percent of people who voted were noncitizens. There’s other studies that have been presented to him. It’s a belief he maintains,” Spicer told us.
But the 2008 Pew study was about out-of-date registration records, not election fraud involving the undocumented. Sean was apparently conflating that Pew study with a separate study that purported to find evidence of election fraud—a study that had already been widely discredited.
Still, Trump wasn’t about to let facts get in his way. He went on to create an election fraud commission, the Presidential Commission on Election Integrity, which, as you may recall and have probably guessed, found zero evidence of widespread voter fraud, certainly not at the scale that would have delivered an additional three million votes to Hillary Clinton. Trump and Spicer were manufacturing their own “alternative facts,” as they so often did, right out of the White House.
A senior White House official tried to blame some of Trump’s tendency to spread false information on his wide network of friends who stay in contact with the president, either by phone or occasional visits to the Oval Office.
“Most of the misinformation the president receives comes from outside this building,” the official said. “He’s got a large circle of friends. He’s got people always trying to impress him, always trying to stay in touch with him,” the official continued.
But that’s not the only source of information that leads Trump astray from the truth, the official said.
“I think he just reads stuff and he says, ‘Did you know. Did you know. Did you know.’”
There were, of course, other lowlights for Spicer. At a press briefing on March 20, 2017, he tried to minimize former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s role in Trump’s election victory, as the Russia investigation unearthed questions regarding Manafort’s ties to corruption in Ukraine and Russia.
“Obviously there’s been discussion of Paul Manafort, who played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time,” Spicer said.
This was silly, and continued to be a ridiculous talking point for the White House. Trump later parroted the lie about Manafort’s “limited” role in the campaign. But truth be told, Manafort was hired by Trump in March 2016 essentially to close the deal for him during the upcoming GOP convention. Manafort, who had worked for other top-tier Republican politicians, was supposed to send a signal to the Washington establishment that Trump’s candidacy was not going to take the
party over a cliff. In May, two months later, Manafort was promoted to campaign chairman, a post he maintained until later that August, when he resigned. As a top official at the Republican National Committee and a fixture of the Washington establishment himself, Spicer knew full well that Manafort had a prominent role with the campaign. But he wasn’t being straight about that.
This brings us to Trump’s infamous accusation that Barack Obama had wiretapped the Manhattan businessman at Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign. To me, it is one of the defining lies of the Trump era. Trump provided no evidence for this claim. As usual, he just tweeted it. And, as is often the case, much of Washington freaked out, shaking up the news cycle. You’ll have to remember that, at that time, folks weren’t yet accustomed to seeing the president blast out conspiracy theories to the masses.
Sadly—and this is the reason that this particular lie is so important—members of Trump’s White House team immediately doubled down on the lie, in a rather comical but also frightening way.
For days, news outlets were consumed by discussions of the president’s unproven claim that his predecessor had essentially spied on him. Obama’s office released a brief statement, denying the claim, but the story had already been injected into the Trump-era news cycle, which means it was everywhere on social media, not to mention dominating much of the coverage in both mainstream and conservative news.
First, Spicer tried to shut the story down, releasing a statement insisting that the White House would have no further comment on the tweets. “Neither the White House nor the president will comment any further,” Spicer said.
But even Spicer’s own press shop lacked message discipline. His then-deputy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in an attempt to give the story legitimacy, made up a ridiculous claim that the wiretapping story had already been reported in the press. That may have been the first of Sarah’s many lies to come.
“Everybody acts like President Trump is the one that came up with this idea and just threw it out there,” she said on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. “There are multiple news outlets that have reported this,” she added, a statement that PolitiFact rated as “False.”
Then, adding to the absurdity of this episode, came Kellyanne Conway, who told a New Jersey newspaper that perhaps Trump had been the victim of a different kind of eavesdropping. Maybe it wasn’t wiretapping, as the president had initially claimed. “What I can say is there are many ways to surveil each other,” Conway told the Bergen County Record. She went on to suggest that Trump could have been secretly recorded using household appliances, such as a “microwave” oven. I don’t know about you guys. I have a defrost setting on my microwave but no button for “Surveil.” I’m pretty sure you can’t “wiretap” a baked potato. But I digress.
All these fact-challenged defenses from Spicer and the larger communications team at the White House demonstrated why these confrontations kept occurring during the press briefings. We just weren’t getting any answers, and that forum was our one chance every day to try to elicit some. We could not merely accept as fact Trump’s assertion that Obama had bugged him. Sorry, but we weren’t born yesterday.
Fortunately for everybody, the Trump team backed down, sort of. On March 16, twelve days after the original, unfounded tweet from Trump, Spicer came as close as he could to issuing a clarification of the president’s erroneous statement. In an exchange from the briefing over the wiretapping accusation, Spicer noticeably shifted the explanation coming out of the White House. All of a sudden, Trump’s claim of wiretapping, we were told, should not be taken literally. The president had put “wiretapping” in quotes, Sean explained, as if that made the falsehood ring true. Usually, you put things in quotes to make things more certain, not to speak about them more generally. Surveillance, Sean claimed, is what Trump was really talking about. Though it should be pointed out, there remains zero evidence to this day that Obama ordered surveillance of Trump at his place of residence and business, as the new president alleged. Republicans and Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees have said as much.
There was a lot of interrupting, as we went back and forth over this, nearly two weeks after Trump posted the wiretapping tweets. But here’s how it played out during the briefing:
ACOSTA: You have a Senate and House Intelligence Committee both leaders from both parties on both of those panels saying that they don’t see any evidence of any wiretapping. So how can the president go on and continue to—
SPICER: Because that’s not—because you’re mischaracterizing what Chairman Nunes said. He said, quote, “I think it’s possible. He’s following up.” So to suggest that is actually and you’re stating unequivocally that you somehow—
ACOSTA: —literally, you said if you—
SPICER: Right, and I think that we’ve already cleared that up. And he said exactly that. But the President has already said clearly when he referred to wiretapping he was referring to surveillance.
ACOSTA: Right, but it sounds like, Sean, that you and the President are saying now, well, we don’t mean wiretapping anymore because that’s not true anymore, so now we’re going to expand that to other forms of surveillance. What’s it going to be next?
SPICER: No, no, Jim, I think that’s cute, but at the end of the day—we’ve talked about this for three or four days. The President had “wiretapping” in quotes; he was referring to broad surveillance. And now you’re basically going back. We talked about this several days ago.
There you have it. When the president had “wiretapping” in quotes, he meant surveillance. The white flag, mercifully, had been raised. Trump, let the record reflect, also walked back his original accusation. In an interview with Fox News, he tried to put the matter to rest by arguing that “wiretapping” could mean lots of things. It was all but an admission that Trump was just making stuff up.
“Don’t forget, when I say ‘wiretapping,’ those words were in quotes,” Trump told Fox. “That really covers, because wiretapping is pretty old-fashioned stuff. But that really covers surveillance and many other things. And nobody ever talks about the fact that it was in quotes, but that’s a very important thing,” he added, suggesting that if you put spoken falsehoods in “air quotes,” you can basically say anything you want. Sorry, that’s not how this works.
As my confrontations with Spicer went viral, it was becoming clear that our contentious exchanges were damaging any real opportunity for us to have some kind of professional relationship, on or off camera. Once you were on Spicer’s bad side, you never really recovered. For me, I suppose, that day came back when I had dared to challenge Trump at the news conference during the transition and Spicer threatened to throw me out. Still, to give Sean some credit, there were times when he did his job as press secretary. He would occasionally call me on the phone, offer information, and try to clarify things, as he should have. But then, the next day, he would snap and go ballistic, leaving us wondering whether he could handle such a high-pressure position.
Part of the problem for Sean was he was trying to do two jobs at once. Spicer had come into the administration serving as both press secretary and communications director. He took on both these positions (a mistake he should have never made) after former Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller surprisingly withdrew his own name from consideration for the position of White House communications director during the presidential transition period. Miller walked away from that coveted administration job after it was revealed that he had fathered a child out of wedlock. Jason and I had butted heads during the campaign—he insulted my reporting live on CNN—but I am not about to run him into the ground here. He made a mistake in his personal life and left Trumpworld to go be with his family.
But Jason’s sudden absence placed Spicer in an unwinnable situation. Any White House veteran would have warned Sean that he was taking on two huge responsibilities. Being the White House press secretary requires enormous preparation. You have to be steeped in policy expertise on a range of sub
jects, from terrorism and North Korea to health care reform and budget issues. Sean, as we now know, was already unprepared for that kind of job. As head of communications for the RNC, he had mainly fielded questions on political strategy and fund-raising, not the intricacies of the Iran nuclear deal. Sounding poorly read on that kind of material can move markets, in the wrong direction.
Add to all that the gargantuan task of serving as communications director for a White House that was just getting off the ground, and you have a recipe for a public relations disaster. A good “comms” director is constantly thinking about the president’s message, as in how to sell it and how it’s being reported. The communications director isn’t typically speaking from the podium. He or she is organizing messaging events with Cabinet members or the president himself. Under Trump, this job is even more impossible when you consider the fact that the forty-fifth president is undisciplined, to put it charitably, and prefers to do his own messaging, no matter how unreliable the information sometimes is. In short, there was no way Sean could do both those jobs—you can’t prepare adequately for the daily briefing if you are planning messaging events, and vice versa—and this two-headed monster led to his eventual demise.
Around the middle of February, I received a tip that Michael Dubke, a little-known GOP operative based in Northern Virginia, was about to be tapped as the new White House communications director. After confirming the news with a White House official, we broke the story late at night. One sign that we had it correct? Sean wasn’t knocking it down. But make no mistake, they were pissed off that it had leaked, and looking back, I see that it was probably leaked to annoy Sean.
The next morning, just before eight o’clock, my phone rang and the name “Sean Spicer” flashed on the screen. I answered. Spicer was, to put it mildly, losing his mind. Visualize veins popping out of his neck. It was that kind of call. He was screaming into the phone, taking issue with part of the story. I calmly tried to explain my reporting to him, but his feelings would not be soothed.