To:
Jackson, Ryan[jackson.ryan@epa.gov]
From: Hadas Gold - POLITICO Media
Sent: Wed 8/2/2017 9:48:09 AM
Subject: Morning Media: WSJ's Trump interview transcript - New Fox News lawsuit - Shine, Lapan
floated for W.H. communications team
By Hadas Gold | 08/02/2017 05:46 AM EDT
With Alex Weprin and Cristiano Lima
POLITICO OBTAINS FULL WSJ INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP: For a few days I had been chasing down a tip that the full transcript of the interview between The Wall Street Journal and President Donald Trump from last week was a doozy. The Journal had posted selected excerpts of the interview, but finally yesterday, thanks to the help of my colleague Josh Dawsey, we got our hands on the full thing. My tipsters were right.
" The transcript is notable not only for all of Trump's comments, which I'll leave to others to describe, but also for how heavily involved Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker was in the interview. It's uncommon that the editor of a newspaper would sit in on an interview with the president, let alone be the lead questioner, especially when the paper has a robust White House team. In fact, editors outnumbered reporters in the interview. Baker, Deputy Editor-inChief Matt Murray and Washington Bureau Chief Paul Beckett joined reporters Michael Bender and Peter Nicholas.
-- Baker also displays how familiar he is with Trump and his family, telling Ivanka Tramp how nice it was to see her at a party thrown last month thrown by Washington Post heiress Lally Weymouth, now the Post's senior associate editor. That party was attended by many politicos, business titans and media elites.
- - Both the president and his daughter praised Baker for a Wall Street Journal editorial published the day before, which commended Tramp's son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner for setting "a disclosure example on Russia" in an 11-page statement released before meeting with Senate and House intelligence committees, describing his contacts with Russian figures during the campaign and after the election. Baker tried to wave them off, thanking them but saying it was colleagues on the editorial team (which is completely separate from the news side) that wrote the piece, but he was cut off by more praise.
-- The Journal's statement: "We are proud of the on-the-record interview we conducted with President Tramp, which produced multiple, newsworthy articles. We published the noteworthy excerpts from the interview. We saw no reason to publish the cross talk that inevitably accompanies any conversation. In keeping with our long standing tradition of total separation between News and Opinion, opinion pieces are the sole responsibility of Paul Gigot [Editor of the Editorial page] and his time team."
- - Deputy editor-in-chief Matt Murray warned staffers in a conference call against leaking the transcript, saying it would be a breach of trust. "Damn right I told them that. It's true," Murray said via a journal spokesperson.
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Read our full piece here.
Good morning and welcome to Morning Media! I always want to hear from you -- hgold@politico.com / @Hadas Gold. Morning Media is edited by Alex Weprin (@alexweprin / alexweprin@gmail.com) and produced with writing/reporting help from Cristiano Lima, (clima@politico.com / @Iudacristiano). Archives. Subscribe.
NEW LAWSUIT ALLEGES WHITE HOUSE WAS BRIEFED ON RETRACTED FOX NEWS SETH RICH ARTICLE by Cristiano Lima: A former Fox News contributor is alleging in a lawsuit the network purposely misquoted him to claim former DNC staffer Seth Rich was connected to WikiLeaks posting hacked DNC emails, a conspiracy that has been rampant in right-wing media for months. In the lawsuit Rod Wheeler alleges a wealthy Trump supporter Ed Butowsky and Fox did so "to discredit reports that the Russians had hacked the DNC in order to help Donald Trump win the presidential election." Butowsky also claimed the President was aware and supportive of the effort. The White House denied that was the case, though former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer did acknowledge that he took a meeting with Butowsky and Wheeler where they outlined the Fox News story. Fox News' head of news Jay Wallace fiercely denied the claims Tuesday, calling the accusations "completely erroneous." It's a long and complicated story. Read more, including the full text of the lawsuit, here.
-- Wheeler's lawyer, Douglas Wigdor, who has represented other cases brought against Fox, told Yahoo News they will seek to depose President Trump and Spicer to question them over their roles in the affair.
BILL SHINE IS UNDER CONSIDERATION FOR A WHITE HOUSE ROLE, The New York Times reports. Last week the former Fox News executive dined at the White House with the president, first lady, now-former Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci and Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Kimberly Guilfoyle. I floated in the newsletter last week that Shine would be an obvious choice to come in and help the White House, especially if they wanted to, as Scaramucci had suggested, produce a daily broadcast from the grounds. Now the Times reports that the administration has spoken to Shine about a "behind-the-scenes role for Mr. Shine that took advantage of his skills producing and staging televised events." It's not clear where that stands now that Scaramucci, who was close to Shine, is out.
-- Fox & Friends hosts Brian Kilmeade and Ainsley Earhardt were also at that dinner with the president, first lady, Scaramucci, Shine, Hannity and Guilfoyle last week, HuffPost reports in a well-reported piece about Scaramucci's last days in the White House. The piece also revealed that Scaramucci and Ryan Lizza's fathers know each other from way back when.
WHITE HOUSE CONSIDERING DHS SPOKESPERSON DAVID LAPAN FOR COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR: Per CNN, new White House Chief of Staff John Kelly is eyeing Lapan, who has worked with Kelly for more than ten years and went with him to the Department of Homeland Security, for communications director. I asked Lapan about possibly joining the administration in my interview with him on Monday but he said he's had no conversations about it with Kelly. Lapan said the same to CNN. More here.
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SPORTS ILLUSTRATED PROFILES TRUMP THROUGH GOLF: I love when non political reporters write stories like these. Using their expertise and sources on their beat - in this case, golf - they gain insight and scoops the typical Washington reporters just don't have. In this case, reporter Alan Shipnuck reported that Trump has called the White House "a dump," is a pretty good golfer and that that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gave Trump a fancy golf club. He also writes about how he's perceived by the Bedminster community, who he's golfed with, and that "a Wall Street banker and member of a Trump club with knowledge of the financing of the $63 million Tumberry purchase expects the deal to be a subject of interest to special prosecutor Robert Mueller, given the foreign lenders he says were involved." Read the full thing here.
NEW YORK TIMES BUYOUTS WILL COST $25 MILLION, by Alex Weprin: The latest round of buyouts and layoffs at The New York Times will cost the company $25 million, according to a Times filing with the SEC on Tuesday. The Times said that in the second quarter of this year, it spent $19.3 million on restructuring costs associated with the buyouts and layoffs, and expects to incur another $6 million in costs in the third quarter. You can read the whole filing, if you so choose, here.
LEGENDARY NEWSMAN MARK SILVA PASSED AWAY YESTERDAY. Silva, a "longtime Tallahassee bureau chief for the Miami Herald who went on to cover the White House for the Chicago Tribune, died early Tuesday at his home in Arlington, Va.. He was 63 and recently diagnosed with a brain tumor," according the Tampa Bay Times. WHCA President and Bloomberg White House correspondent Margaret Talev wrote "From his time at the Miami Herald and Knight Rider to the Chicago Trib, Bloomberg and most recently US News, Mark was a great journalist, role model, adviser and friend - to me for the past 20 years and to some of you for even longer."
REVOLVING DOOR:
-- The latest in the New York Times buyout watch, from Poynter.
- - Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is now a CNN contributor.
SOUNDBITE: "Legally, it may have been on the record, but the spirit of it was off." [Anthony Scaramucci]
TIL: Thanks to Alex Weprin: Jousting became the official sport of Maryland in 1962.
EXTRAS:
-- Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spoke to reporters in the State Department's briefing room for the first time in six months. [Andrea Mitchell, who just celebrated her 39th week with NBC News]
-- Gizmodo is suing the FBI for its files on former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who died earlier
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this year. [Gizmodo] -- Podcast company Gimlet Media raised $15 million in a round of VC funding. [Recode] -- New York Times staffers were warned via memo "from someone claiming to be a student researching a media project and asking for" interviews. [Dylan Byers] -- Washingtonian profiled The Hollywood Reporter and its growing influence in the Trump era. [Washingtonian] -- Katie Couric turned down a big offer from Yahoo to stay with the company. [New York Post] -- Anthony Scaramucci's explosive interview with The New Yorker interview tested which curse words are fit to print at The Wall Street Journal. [Poynter] -- Scaramucci got "TMZ'd" and said he "doesn't know how to dance" when asked whether he'd join "Dancing With the Stars" [HuffPost] -- An oral history of the Scaramucci era of the White House. [Washington Post] -- British parliament has credentialed a pro-Brexit news site staffed by former Vote Leave campaigners, raising questions about press access in the U.K. [BuzzFeed] To view online: http://www.politico.com/media/tipsheets/morning-media/2017/08/02/wsjs-trump-interviewtranscript-new-fox-news-lawsuit-shine-lapan-floated-for-wh-communications-team-001323 To change your alert settings, please go to https://secure.politico.com/settings
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