President Trump Doubles Down on Idea of Ending White House Press Briefings

President Trump is sticking to his comments that it may be a good idea to end daily White House press briefings.

“Unless I have them every two weeks and do it myself, we won’t have them,” Trump said in an interview with Fox. “I think it’s a good idea.”

He added that he felt there was an “incredible” amount of hostility from reporters toward Press Secretary Sean Spicer and Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Earlier Friday, Trump tweeted that “it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy” and that “the best thing to do” might be to cancel future press briefings in favor of hand-written responses.

This comes after Spicer, Sanders, Vice President Mike Pence and Trump gave conflicting reports for why former FBI Director James Comey was fired earlier in the week.

The White House Correspondents’ Association responded to the tweets with a statement from President Jeff Mason saying that the briefings “provide substantive and symbolic opportunities for journalists to pose questions to officials at the highest levels of the U.S. government.”

“That exercise, conducted in full view of our republic’s citizens, is clearly in line with the spirit of the First Amendment,” the statement continues. “Doing away with briefings would reduce accountability, transparency, and the opportunity for Americans to see that, in the U.S. system, no political figure is above being questioned.”

Mason added that the White House Correspondents’ Association would object to anything that could threaten those constitutionally-protected principles.