Politico‘s Tara Palmeri: White House Had ‘Threatened to Try to Remove Me’ from WHCA

You may remember a few days ago when White House Correspondents Association head Jeff Mason said that the Trump White House asked him to criticize a report from one of its members and he declined to do so. Well, Mason appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources this morning alongside the reporter in question: Politico White House correspondent Tara Palmeri.

Mason confirmed to Brian Stelter that it was regarding one of Palmeri’s reports “about media access.”

Stelter––who noted that Mason and Palmeri appearing on the show together was “a coincidence based on our booking this week”––asked Palmeri about this.

Here’s how Palmeri responded:

“Well, I’m not surprised because I had heard from my editor that they had threatened to try to remove me from the White House Correspondents Association, which they don’t have power to do. They’re an independent association. And they were upset because I wrote a story that was completely factual, that over the course of the trip, the president had not given a press conference. That is plain and simple. And we also did not get access to senior administration officials regularly until my story came out. After that, we had so much more access to them.”

She added, “Otherwise, it would have literally been the same as watching the president’s trip on state-owned television. We were getting our information from foreign officials before we were getting it from White House officials.”

Back in February, Palmeri talked about being blocked from a White House press gaggle and said when she asked for a statement about why this was happening to a few news outlets, an aide said in response, “You’re threatening me.”

Watch above, via CNN.

[image via screengrab]

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