President-elect Trump on Wednesday said his administration will continue to conduct press briefings and allow reporters to work inside the White House, after his team faced a brutal backlash earlier this week for suggesting the press corps be moved to a bigger location nearby.
“The press went crazy, so I said, ‘Let’s not move it,'” Trump said on “Fox and Friends,” noting that “some people in the press will not be able to get” into press conferences or briefings because the James S. Brady room, where such events have been held since the Nixon era, only offers 49 seats.
“We have so many people that want to go in so we’ll just have to pick the people to go into the room – I’m sure other people will be thrilled about that,” he said. “We offered a much larger room because we need a much larger room and we offered to do that, but they went crazy.”
“They’ll be begging for a much larger room very soon, you watch,” added the president-elect.
Incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer had previously said he was considering moving the press corps to the Old Executive Offices located just next door to the White House.
“There’s been so much interest in covering a President Donald Trump. A question is: ‘Is a room that has 49 seats adequate?'” Spicer had told Esquire over the weekend. “When we had that press conference the other day, we had thousands of requests, and we capped it at four hundred. Is there an opportunity to potentially allow more members of the media to be part of this? That’s something we’re discussing.”
White House Correspondents’ Association president Jeff Mason called a meeting with Spicer shortly after the comments were made.
“I made clear that the WHCA would view it as unacceptable if the incoming administration sought to move White House reporters out of the press workspace behind the press briefing room,” Mason later said in a statement. “Access in the West Wing to senior administration officials, including the press secretary, is critical to transparency and to journalists’ ability to do their jobs.”
