Sean Spicer, incoming White House press secretary and communications director, suggested Thursday that President-elect Trump would wait until after his inauguration to appoint a justice to the Supreme Court seat left vacant by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February.
“He’s solicited some input,” Spicer said of Trump during an interview on the “Hugh Hewitt Show” radio program. “But I think that I wouldn’t expect an announcement until probably, you know, he is officially the president of the United States.”
Spicer, the current spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said Trump has not yet interviewed candidates for the Supreme Court nomination.
“He has had some discussions with staff and different outside groups and solicited some input, but to the best of my knowledge, there have been no one interviewed,” Spicer said.
Trump released a short list of potential Supreme Court picks in May and expanded the pool of contenders in September. He made the judiciary vacancy a focal point of his pitch to conservatives who were nervous about voting for a former Democratic donor.
Although the president-elect’s team has made waves by hinting at plans to shake up the way White House officials interact with members of the press corps, Spicer said Trump will still engage the mainstream media as president.
“What we owe the press conference, I would qualify that as engagement with left-wing media. And that’s going to come in January as he’s already talked about,” Spicer said of Trump’s upcoming press conference.
“Look, I get it, we’re not going to win a battle whether the New York Times is going to ever give us a fair shake or not,” Spicer added. “But we recognize that there’s, you know, a few thousand readers or so left that still look at the New York Times, and so it’s worth, probably, talking to them. I think, and so we’re going to utilize various outlets to continue the conversation.”
