Key White House staff and a former FBI official are concerned that Donald Trump’s ‘tweetstorms’ and contradictory messages show the President is ‘out of control’.
Trump took to Twitter on Friday morning to express frustration with both his press team’s handling of his decision to fire former FBI Director James Comey and an ongoing FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 president election.
‘Jesus,’ was all one White House staffer could say, in reaction to seeing the Friday morning tweets roll in while talking with a Daily Beast reporter.
Even Vice-President Mike Pence is said to be a ‘little rattled’ at the events of the past few days and the struggle to stay on message.
The onslaught of tweets was brought on by Trump’s decision to fire Comey on Tuesday, and the subsequent contradictory stories attempting to explain the sequence of events that led up to that decision that came from the White House press team, Pence and Trump in the days that followed.
A former FBI official spoke with CNBC Washington correspondent Eamon Javers Friday morning, who tweeted an account of the conversation just over an hour after Trump tweeted allegations that Russian election meddling was cooked up by Democrats and what appeared to be a threat that Comey had better not talk to the press.
‘”First he started a war with the intelligence agencies, and now he wants one with the FBI?”‘ Eamon tweeted that a former high ranking FBI official said to him.
The official said, ‘This is not going to end well for this administration. He is out of control. It is so out of the norm for him to even say that. This threatens the independence of the FBI and goes against core American values.’
Trump also threw his public relations team under the bus when he suggested that he was the only one who could improve the White House’s messaging problem in a preview clip from his interview with Judge Jeanine Pirro, which will air Saturday on Fox News.
‘As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!’ Trump tweeted Friday.
‘Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future ‘press briefings’ and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???’
In the interview clip with Pirro, he said again that there shouldn’t be press briefings at all.
‘[Not] unless I have them every two weeks and I do them myself, we don’t have them. I think it’s a good idea,’ he said.
The potential cancelling of future press briefings, where the press have seemingly a direct line to gain clarity on vague and contradictory statements is a story in itself, with potentially dire implications for an administration that has already come under fire for questionable truth-telling practices.
Whether this is a foreshadowing of what’s to come or another reminder to his press team that they are replaceable is unclear.
People are keeping their heads down,’ a staffer told the Daily Beast anonymously.
Apparently Trump is not shy about letting the communications department know their jobs are anything but secure.
But according to one staffer, divergences in messaging are not their fault.
‘It’s not that we don’t know what the president wants to say, it’s that the president doesn’t know what the president wants to say,’ the staffer said.
As White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was out of the office on Naval Reserve duty, Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was at the podium and in charge of delivering the message about how Comey’s firing came to pass.
‘They had come to him to express their concerns,’ she said during her first White House press briefing on Wednesday, of the president’s Monday meeting with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
‘So it’s the White House’s assertion that Rod Rosenstein decided on his own, after being confirmed, to review Comey’s performance?’ a reporter asked.
‘Absolutely,’ Sanders said.
Pence said the same thing when asked about the timeline of Comey’s firing.
But then Trump told NBC’s Lester Holt something very different in a portion of interview that aired before Thursday’s White House press briefing.
‘Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey,’ he said.
A senior administration figure said of Pence: ‘He’s not rattled very often and he was a little rattled.’
The adviser added to CNN: ‘He went out there without all the information. It was not an attempt to lie.’
This kind of bomb dropping isn’t foreign to Trump’s press team.
The communications staff often fields landmines related to tweets and public statements made by Trump that differ from the White House’s already-stated official word on a wide variety of topics, one staffer said.
‘When POTUS tweetstorms, it is often all-hands [on deck]’ for the team, a senior Trump aide said.
Source: Ex FBI official, White House staff react to Trump tweets | Daily Mail Online
McCain said the pardon undermined the president’s “claim for the respect of rule of law.”
