A Journal reporter was removed from the pool covering the president’s trip this weekend.
President Donald Trump on Monday followed up his lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over last week’s Jeffrey Epstein story by banishing one of the newspaper’s reporters from Air Force One for an upcoming Scotland trip.
The moves reflect Trump’s aggressiveness toward media who displease him — even a media magnate, Rupert Murdoch, with outlets that have been friendly to him in the past.
Trump filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the Journal and Murdoch on Friday because of the newspaper’s article about a sexually suggestive letter bearing Trump’s name that was included in a 2003 album compiled for alleged sex trafficker Epstein’s birthday. The president has denied having anything to do with it.
On Monday, the White House said it was removing a Journal reporter from the pool covering the president’s trip this weekend to his golf courses in Turnberry and Aberdeen in Scotland. The Journal’s Tarini Parti had been scheduled to cover him on the trip.
“Due to the Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the thirteen outlets on board,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
The Journal declined comment on the action.Aggressiveness with the press is in the Trump playbook
It’s a tactic the Trump White House has used before. It restricted the access of journalists from The Associated Press to press events when the news outlet would not change its style guidelines to reflect Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.
