Come on Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer: Next time, you’ve got to at least try to stick up for your colleagues.
Exhibit A in Spicer’s arsenal is a tweet promoting an article by Politico Magazine columnist Rich Lowry:
In theory, 37 electors could flip against Trump and deny him the 270 electoral votes needed to win https://t.co/VNQH179207 pic.twitter.com/bj7uNTvfpi
— POLITICO (@politico) December 16, 2016
The notion that something “could” happen didn’t satisfy Spicer’s journalistic standards. “In theory, this building could float away and go to Mars. That’s not a serious thought about what’s going on in the election,” said Spicer.
Exhibit B has gotten plenty of coverage here and elsewhere. It’s the tweet by now-former Politico Magazine contract writer Julia Ioffe, who made the vile suggestion that Donald Trump could be having sex with his daughter Ivanka. Very shortly after the tweet took flight, Politico Editor Carrie Budoff Brown terminated Ioffe’s contract (which was winding down in any case; she was hired by the Atlantic early this month). “It was disgusting, reprehensible, unacceptable,” said Spicer.
Not just that: There was no coverage in Politico — chronicler of all things in the political realm — of this tweet by its own contract reporter. “You have a media reporter,” said Spicer. “Use them.”
Referring again to his package, Spicer claimed that there wasn’t a single positive story about the RNC, despite its having put together “the best group operation in, I believe, in political history and everything becomes a story about how we came up wrong.”
Responded Sherman, “Fair enough.”
Exhibit C: A Politico report that Twitter was “bounced” from a Trump tech meeting. The gripe from Spicer: “There’s this story that a reporter from Politico put out saying that Sean Spicer disinvited Twitter from a tech meeting. Now first of all, I’d love to say that I have the power to disinvite someone from a meeting with the president-elect. But I don’t, and they were never invited, and I was never asked by Politico whether that happened. And yet I can’t put that story back in the bottle….Once it’s out there, it’s out there.”
Responded Sherman, “Understood.”