The Trump administration’s efforts to rewrite the rules for media coverage reached a furious peak on Wednesday as veteran State Department reporters expressed outrage over Secretary Rex Tillerson’s decision to take only a reporter from a conservative website on his first trip to Asia.
When the State Department was first pressed on why a tough question from Fox News correspondent James Rosen was missing from a Dec. 2, 2013, press briefing, a spokeswoman attributed the matter to a “glitch.” But when asked about it on Wednesday, a spokesman said that an internal probe into the matter had revealed that a “specific request was made to excise” the video.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, comes a day after Hillary Clinton broke her silence about her use of a private email account while secretary of state. The FOIA requests and lawsuit seek materials related to her public and private calendars, correspondence involving longtime aides likely to play key roles in her expected campaign for president, and Clinton-related emails about the Osama bin Laden raid and National Security Agency surveillance practices.
