The hosts and media panelists of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” hit the New York Times on Tuesday, after the paper’s opinion editor publicly acknowledged the existence of “off the record” comments from Donald Trump from when he recently met with the Times editorial board.
A Times spokesperson on Monday confirmed a report by the website BuzzFeed that said there are transcripts from the Jan. 5 board meeting. The report said that the transcripts reveal Trump offering “flexibility” on his hardline immigration positions, though the Times said it would only release the transcripts if Trump agreed to it.
“I thought off the record comments were off the record, first of all,” said “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough. He said it was “ridiculous,” and that for the Times “to take off the record comments and then leak them just tells me, never have an off the record conversation with the New York Times.”
“Those are sort of sacrosanct precincts, in an editorial board meeting,” said liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. He said that “off the record” should be interpreted as meaning “it never happened.”
“You don’t necessarily even acknowledge publicly that such a meeting took place,” Robinson said.
Veteran Republican campaign strategist Steve Schmidt said, “If I was running the Donald Trump campaign, every New York Times reporter on [my] plane would be off of it until and unless they clarify the attributional policies of the newspaper.”
At issue is an often times mercurial understanding of what “off the record” means among journalists. At it’s most extreme, it means that contact between a source and a reporter never took place. If one interview between a source and a reporter, however, toggles between off and on the record, at the request of the subject, it can create confusion between the two parties as to what can and cannot be acknowledged about the content of the interview.
“Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski said the Times, in acknowledging the off the record portion of its interview with Trump, “is doing Donald Trump’s bidding.”
“This is exactly the mistake,” she said. “It’s the laughing at first, the scoffing, the disdain, the ‘oh my god, he can’t do it,’ and then you’re caught with your pants down being so wrong that you start doing things that are outside the realms of your editorial instincts and standards because you can’t stand it.”
Appearing Monday on Fox News, Trump himself acknowledged that at least some parts of his meeting with the Times was off the record. “We had a board meeting, it was off the record, all of a sudden they leak it, it’s all over the place,” he said. He also said as president, he would be willing to negotiate on immigration policy, of which his trademark policy is to “build a wall” on the Southern border.
“Things are negotiable, I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “You know, I’ll make the wall two feet shorter or something. I mean, everything’s negotiate. Building it? Not negotiable.”
