The White House has imposed new restrictions for media passes and it appears it will leave one conservative outlet out in the cold.
The conservative Heritage Foundation’s news organization “The Daily Signal” is having its “hard pass,” removed, which is needed for unrestricted access to the West Wing press room, and what is considered a status symbol in media circles, The Washington Examiner reported.
“I have covered the Obama and the Trump administrations and have not seen a press purge like this, and it should be concerning to anyone when an administration attempts to select who can and can’t cover it,” Fred Lucas, The Daily Signal White House Correspondent said.
“Under the new policy, there is zero transparency from the White House as to how many journalists are losing their hard passes. Moreover, the administration has never articulated a justification for purging media they deem noncompliant,” he said.
The news outlet’s executive editor, Rob Bluey, reported on the matter in a bluntly titled story, “Biden Boots Daily Signal Reporter From White House Press Briefings.”
Dr. Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, tweeted: “The White House is making it harder for reporters to cover the so-called most ‘open and transparent administration in history.’ If this happened under the prior administration, the media would be screaming censorship. Today, there’s not a peep. Shameful.”
Numerous other media outlets are also set to lose their passes due to the new rules, although the specific ones affected have not been disclosed yet. Notably, Simon Ateba, the White House correspondent for Today News Africa, is also expected to lose his pass as a result of his contentious interactions with White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, the Examiner reported
The new rules mandate that in order to have a press pass for the White House Press Briefing room the news organization must also have a pass for another federal agency like the Supreme Court, which is much tougher for a non-traditional news organization to get.
This month White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre appeared to be exhausted and frustrated with all of the questions she had been getting about cocaine and she took her aggression out on a reporter.
The altercation happened when a reporter again asked for Jean-Pierre to unequivocally state that the cocaine that was found in the White House did not belong to the Biden family.
“Can you just say once and for all whether or not the cocaine belonged to the Biden family?” the reporter said.
“We’re not avoiding the question, that is not true, we’ve answered the question, and we’ve litigated the question for the past two days exhaustively,” the press secretary said.
“You know, there has been some irresponsible reporting about the family and so I gotta call that out here. I have been very clear. I was clear two days ago when talking about this over and over again as I was being asked the questions, as you know, and media outlets reported this. The Biden family was not here. They were not here. They were at Camp David. They were not here Friday. They were not here Saturday. They were not here Sunday. They were not even here on Monday. They came back on Tuesday,” she said.
“So to ask that question is actually incredibly irresponsible and I’ll just leave it there,” she said.
It should be noted that again she did not unequivocally deny that the cocaine belonged to the Bidens.
It came a day after another administration official would not confirm or deny that the cocaine found in the White House belonged to President Joe Biden or his son Hunter Biden.
What’s more, they will not even commit to letting the American citizens know who the culprit is, if that person is discovered.
“You know, President — former President Trump has made some pretty wild posts recently on social media. One of them was that the cocaine found in the White House was — had belonged to either the President or his son. Are you willing to say that that’s not the case, that they don’t belong to them?” a reporter asked Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates aboard Air Force One.
What followed was one of the greatest deflections in the history of deflections.
“I don’t have a response to that because we have to be careful about the Hatch Act,” Bates said.
The Hatch Act precludes Bates, or any Executive Branch official, “from engaging in partisan political activity while on duty, in a federal facility or using federal property.”
How answering the question about whether or not the cocaine belonged to one of the Biden’s is a violation of that Act is unknown.