Reince Priebus says talk of a new presidential press conference space is 'getting way out of whack'
Incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus on Sunday said rumors of changes to presidential press conferences have been blown out of proportion. Esquire first reported Saturday that the "media's sense of dislocation may soon become literal" as "a plan to evict the press corps from the White House is under serious consideration by the incoming Trump administration."
Speaking on ABC's This Week, Priebus said that is not the case. "The press room that people see on TV is very, very tiny," he said, and only "49 people fit in that press room. The one thing that we discussed was whether or not we want to move the initial press conferences in the [Executive Office Building] — which, by the way, is the White House, so no one's moving out of the White House, that is the White House — where you can fit four times the amount of people in the press conference, allow more press, more coverage from all over the country to have those conferences." (The Executive Office Building is actually next door to the White House, directly across the street from the West Wing.)
That's all the Trump team is considering, Priebus concluded, so "some of this, I think, is getting what out of whack, and I think people should be encouraged that there are so many people in the press that want to participate." Watch his remarks in context below. Bonnie Kristian
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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