2/7/2019

STATE/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The State Department broke its silence on Thursday [2-7-19], holding its first public press briefing of 2019. The number of briefings at the agency have plummeted since the Trump administration came into office, plunging from what was a near-daily occurrence in past administrations to a sporadically scheduled event that regular watchers say offers a truncated and less substantive version of past practice. The State Department gave a mere 61 briefings in all of 2018 — compared with more than triple that in 2016, the last year of the Obama administration– with 219 briefings. Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino on Thursday attempted to explain the lack of these public question-and-answer sessions by citing the recent government shutdown. But that doesn’t explain why the number of briefings throughout last year remained very low, with, for example, only four briefings in April, five in May and three in June…He cited the number of interviews and smaller scale information sessions Pompeo and his department have given, though that was standard practice under previous administrations in addition to almost daily briefings for the entire State press corps.”

Michelle Kosinski, “State Department breaks ‘silence’ with first briefing 38 days into 2019,” CNN Politics, CNN.com, February 7, 2019 7:55 pm