Washington Post’s Dana Milbank Claims WH Press Corps Forced to ‘Walk on Eggshells’ After Press Pass Purge

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, who claims he lost his White House press pass as part of a “mass purge,” now says “everybody essentially in the White House press corps is on probation serving there at the pleasure of [press secretary] Sarah Sanders.”

“They can take those press passes away from anybody anytime they want,” Milbank said on Joy Reid’s MSNBC show AM Joy on Saturday. “So anybody is essentially walking on eggshells now.”

Milbank appeared with The Washington Post‘s Jonathan Capehart, who said he also lost his press pass but noted he has not been to the White House much and thought that was why he lost the pass originally.

Capehart said when he got the email saying “therefore your pass is expired, I didn’t think anything of it. I thought, well, they got me. …  But it wasn’t until I read Dana’s column this week where I realized oh, holy smokes, this was a systematic thing.”

Milbank then said he thinks people will soon notice a “dramatic” scale back in press access and says most press passes are now governed under a probationary policy.

“And I think we’re there already, so I fully expect in the coming months we’re going to see more people under this probationary policy have their press passes yanked. I suspect we’ll have another sort of muted outcry,” he continued on.

Milbank previously asked the White House to respond to the accusations made in his WaPo op-ed about the alleged purge. They declined.

Watch above, via MSNBC