Moments after the Wall Street Journal was removed from the White House travel press pool as retribution for the newspaper’s bombshell about Donald Trump’s alleged birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was greeted on the WSJ’s sister network with softball questions about Hunter Biden.
As has largely been the case since the president filed his $10 billion lawsuit against the WSJ , its parent company News Corp and its owner Rupert Murdoch over the story, Fox News – which is also owned by Murdoch – once again ignored the White House’s vendetta against the right-wing network’s 94-year-old founder.
Following Trump’s concerted effort to dismiss the so-called Epstein files as a Democratic “hoax” amid a MAGA uproar over his Justice Department concluding Epstein had no “client list,” the WSJ published a much-anticipated report on Thursday evening detailing the president’s once-close relationship with the dead sex offender.
The blockbuster story claimed Trump gave Epstein a “bawdy” card for his 50th birthday that included a hand-drawn sketch of a naked woman with Trump’s signature mimicking pubic hair. The report also claimed Trump wrote Epstein a personalized message that concluded: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Asserting that the sexually suggestive birthday card is a “fake thing,” Trump – likely emboldened by CBS owner Paramount settling the “meritless” 60 Minutes complaint – threatened legal action against the WSJ and his on-again/off-again friend Murdoch before filing a libel lawsuit on Friday afternoon.
The defendants “failed to attach the letter, failed to attach the alleged drawing, failed to show proof that President Trump authored or signed any such letter, and failed to explain how this purported letter was obtained,” the president’s lawsuit alleges. “The reason for those failures is because no authentic letter or drawing exists,” the complaint adds.
Fox News – which enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the president and has helped staff his administration – has mostly steered clear of reporting on either the WSJ’s scoop or the president’s subsequent defamation lawsuit against the network’s founder and owner.
So far, the WSJ’s story has only been mentioned on a handful of Fox News programs – one of which is the Journal Editorial Report, a show co-produced by the WSJ. Fox News media host Howie Kurtz also devoted the opening segment of Sunday morning’s MediaBuzz to the lawsuit and the eye-popping report.
On Monday afternoon, the White House followed up by removing reporters from the WSJ from the pool of journalists scheduled to cover the president’s upcoming four-day trip to Scotland to tour his golf courses. Tarini Parti, a White House reporter for the WSJ, had been initially slated to serve as the print pooler for the final two days of the visit.
“As the appeals court confirmed, the Wall Street Journal or any other news outlet are not guaranteed special access to cover President Trump in the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One, and in his private workspaces,” Leavitt said in a statement. “Due to the Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the [13] outlets on board. Every news organization in the entire world wishes to cover President Trump, and the White House has taken significant steps to include as many voices as possible.”
The latest action by the White House echoes its ban of Associated Press journalists from covering Oval Office events after the wire service said it would not refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” following Trump’s executive order renaming the body of water, citing editorial standards. Shortly after Trump took office, Leavitt took control of pool rotation assignments from the White House Correspondents’ Association.
Appearing on Fox News’ The Story moments after confirming that she had booted the WSJ from the travel pool, Leavitt didn’t have to worry about being pressed by anchor Martha MacCallum to explain the latest move against the network’s sister publication.
