MS NOW correspondent Vaughn Hillyard said now-former White House press secretary Katie Zacharia’s early moments show why her messaging matters well beyond the briefing room, from foreign leaders to President Donald Trump’s own supporters.
Zacharia was abruptly fired on Friday, CNN reported, following a disastrous first press conference and a series of revelations that she misrepresented her legal credentials.
“People like [Ukrainian President] Volodymyr Zelenskyy and [Russian President] Vladimir Putin are tuning in to the minutia of hour to hour and what is being communicated out of this White House,” said Hillyard, adding that there are “deep questions” about the White House’s policies and stance.
He pointed to a moment in Zacharia’s first briefing, when Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked whether the U.S. would keep sharing intelligence with Ukraine. Her answer, Hillyard said, was essentially “I’m not sure, I’ll have to get back to you.”
“That’s a very basic, important consequence question,” Hillyard said.
He also questioned who she chose for her first interview. Before Fox’s Sean Hannity, he said, she sat down with Jack Posobiec of Real America’s Voice, whom Hillyard described as “one of the conspiracy theorists that was on the front line in pushing Pizzagate back in 2016.”
Hillyard said the choice matters because “there’s an information stream coming out of this White House that has deep consequences, not just domestically, but well beyond.”
He said he’d heard concern from Trump’s own voters too. A woman at the Trump rally where he was reporting asked him about the press briefing “and she kind of made this face like, I’m not so sure that that was so great, but maybe she’ll work her way into it.”
“There’s international consequences, political domestic consequences here about who is representing this White House,” Hillyard said. “And right now, there’s a lot of questions about it.”
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