Why Ever Bother Calling a Trump Regime Press Office?

It's been a remarkable week for the press. In a week in which the president's corruption* and authoritarianism were displayed, inter alia, in a letter from his personal lawyer threatening to sue CNN and the New York Times for defamation for accurate reporting on intelligence reports concerning the United States airstrike on Iran--a letter that was rightly met with the response, "No retraction is needed. No apology is forthcoming."--here's another item in the annals of Trump regime contempt for both transparency and the role of the press in investigating and reporting on government. Granted, it involves an insane person, but insanity is no disqualification for high office in this regime. 

The lunatic in question this time is Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who wrote on the regime's de-facto official channel to complain that a Washington Post reporter had engaged in what she called "harassment" of ODNI staff. Gabbard said: "Instead of reaching out to my press office, she is calling high level Intelligence Officers from a burner phone, refusing to identify herself, lying about the fact that she works for the Washington Post, and then demanding they share sensitive information." I assume Gabbard is lying or engaging in subterfuge about the last three items on her bill of particulars and did not conceal her identity from the individuals she spoke to. And I'm not sure what relevance the use of a burner phone has, except that acting under the assumption that your government wants to investigate or persecute you is good journalistic practice under this regime (and has been a good idea under other administrations too, at least in the national security area).

But I'm struck by that phrase, "Instead of reaching out to my press office." Press or communications offices can be a good thing and good press people can be useful, honest brokers. Frequently, they are also experienced and expert about the subject matter of the agency or company whose media relations they handle. But of course they are there for efficiency and transparency, not because there is some kind of rule or expectation that you should always turn to them first. If your question is for the Department of Homeland Security's Director for Crisis and Weather Management, and you have that person's phone or office number, that's who you call or visit. Whether that person wants to tell you to talk to go to the press office instead is their business, not yours. And if you're not sure who to call, or are doing a more comprehensive piece, and you have a list of 200 employees, you call all 200 people on that list. This is called reporting, not harassment. As the Post's executive editor said today: "Reaching out to potential sources rather than relying solely on official government press statements regarding matters of public interest is neither nefarious nor is it harassment. It is basic journalism." Indeed, it's the kind of journalism we always need more of, and precisely why Substack pages or skimming through Twitter feeds are no substitute for heavily staffed pressrooms.

It is not administration-specific that good reporting requires more than simply going to the press office with one's hand out. But it's especially true given the staffing of this regime. In any administration, the good practice would be to make the best possible use of the press office and also try to find and communicate directly with sources. But the question one must ask about this regime is: Why would one bother to talk to a Trump regime press office at all? Its press practices, and the staffing of its press offices, have been remarkably consistent across agencies. It is a customary joke or assumption that all press people lie. But lying is quite literally not incidental to but the primary job of press offices under Trump v. 2, and they undertake it with both energy and determination.

Beyond this, the press people in the current regime are unreliable not only because of a constitutional propensity to lie, but because they simply lack the expertise and experience that actually makes someone in a press office at a specialized agency valuable. ODNI is a good example. During the Obama administration, the spokesperson for the office had previously spent two decades in the Marine Corps and did media relations there and elsewhere before taking the job. The DNI press person during most of the first Trump administration spent ten years working in that office before taking on the communications director role. The person in that role during the Biden administration served in the Navy, then as a civilian in the National Counterterrorism Center, ODNI, and the CIA before coming back to the communications role at ODNI. The person Gabbard thinks reporters should go to, first and probably last, for information about complex matters of national security graduated from college in 2020, has been flacking on the Hill ever since, and has no background in intelligence or national security.

This is not a personal insult; I don't have that background either. But clearly she is not qualified to do the job, if that job involves something other than bullshitting. This is entirely characteristic of virtually all of the regime's press hires. Of course, more generally it's characteristic of the regime's appointments altogether. From the man in the Oval Office all the way down, the staffing of the regime looks as though, some 40 years ago, Donald Trump ran across the phrase "Peter Principle" in a copy of Forbes and assumed the article was recommending it as good management practice. In short, not only is there no good reason to go to the ODNI press office first, but there is little reason for a reporter who knows much more about the subject than the agency's spokesperson does to go there at all. And the same is true across the whole branch.  

*Why corruption, in this context? Because it's not some claim that the journalists violated national security law, but a personal lawsuit brought by Trump's private lawyer. (How, exactly, that lawyer has the information or security clearance necessary to make some of the claims he makes in the letter, except as mere flourishes, is beyond me. But this is not a regime that takes management of confidential information especially seriously.) And that lawsuit can be yet another ring on the cash register, especially with respect to a company like CNN, if you have someone around who is servile and/or unscrupulous enough to use his office as leverage.