Kellyanne Conway Stands by Washington Examiner Call as Paper Defends Reporter from ‘Bullying and Threatening’

Josh FeldmanOct 24th, 2019, 8:03 pm
 

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway has a lengthy statement out tonight standing by her confrontational call with a Washington Examiner reporter.

Examiner breaking news reporter Caitlin Yilek wrote a report Tuesday on how President Donald Trump was considering Conway or Steve Mnuchin to replace Mick Mulvaney. Trump later denied it, but Conway was clearly bothered by this paragraph:

Conway has been in the middle of Trump’s barbs with her husband, George, a conservative lawyer who frequently makes headlines for his criticism of the president. George Conway said earlier this month that White House aides should resign unless they can “have some moderating or blunting effect” on Trump. He refused to discuss his wife, who has worked for Trump since the 2016 presidential campaign.

Conway — who apparently didn’t say this was off the record — confronted Yilek over including this. Yilek defended the newsworthiness of highlighting George’s tweeting and said it’s relevant context for the report.

Conway confronted and repeatedly scolded Yilek, saying at one point “he gets his power through me, if you haven’t noticed” and asking “Are you an expert on my marriage? Are you an expert on my job? Are you an expert on the way this White House works? Are you an expert on Twitter? I mean, what exactly are you an expert on that would qualify you to say, to characterize the way I feel?”

She even said, “If you’re going to cover my personal life, then we’re welcome to do the same around here. If it has nothing to do with my job, which it doesn’t, that’s obvious, then we’re either going to expect you to cover everybody’s personal life or we’re going to start covering them over here.”

Conway responded to the Examiner publishing the transcript and audio of the call tonight, continuing to take shots at Yilek’s job title and saying “it seems irrelevant if not sexist to mention my husband in describing me.”

She said, “What I said on that call I’ve said publicly on-the-record before, including on TV, in speeches, in driveway gaggles with reporters. I did NOT indicate the call was off-the-record, but the reporter certainly thought it was. Toward the end of the call, she asks if I’d like to put something ‘on the record.'”

“I’ve inquired publicly previously why and when some reporting has been reduced to palace intrigue, or some threadbare combination of reading Twitter, repeating TV and cutting and pasting someone else’s story,” she continued. “Why is it oriented toward ‘getting the person’ rather than ‘getting the story’? That seems more to get something off the chest of the writer than into the mind of the reader.”

Conway brought up personal questions she has received from reporters (“public figures, with highly-paid agents, big contracts, speaking gigs”) and added, “It is easy, as I have noted, to see messy lives in glass houses nearly everywhere I turn, I don’t make it a practice to raise this with people so as to harass or embarrass them.”

The paper responded with a statement from editor in chief Hugo Gurdon.

“Off the record conversations are agreed in good faith and in advance between people known to be participating,” Gurdon said. “They are not, and never have been, blanket coverage to shield people who pull a bait and switch, peremptorily enter the conversation, and then spend ten minutes bullying and threatening a reporter.”

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Josh Feldman - Senior Editor

Josh Feldman is a Senior Editor at Mediaite. Email him here: josh@mediaite.com Follow him on Twitter: @feldmaniac