From: Elizabeth D. Horton To: Seth Jaffe Subject: OGE FOIA FY 17-211 Date: Wednesday, February 22, 2017 4:49:25 PM Good afternoon. OGE has received a FOIA request seeking “all emails, to and from OGE spokesperson Seth Jaffe, that contain the word ‘KELLYANNE’ and/or ‘CONWAY.’” The time frame for this request is November 1, 2016 through the present. I know that you have searched for similar records in response to another FOIA request, but this request is a bit broader and covers a different time period. Please search your email account for any records responsive to this request and provide any responsive records by COB March 1, 2017. If you do not have any responsive records for this FOIA request, please reply with a “no responsive records” response. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you. Liz Elizabeth D. Horton Assistant Counsel, Legal, External Affairs and Performance Branch Program Counsel Division U.S. Office of Government Ethics (202) 482-9211 [email protected] Visit OGE’s website: www.oge.gov Follow OGE on Twitter: @OfficeGovEthics From: The Washington Post To: Seth Jaffe Subject: [GRAYMAIL] The Daily 202: At acrimonious post-election conference, Trump and Clinton strategists agree only on anger at the media. Even then, not really. Date: Friday, December 02, 2016 10:13:22 AM Sore winners, sore losers and the press in the crosshairs If you're having trouble reading this, click here. The Daily 202 Share on Twitter Share on Facebook At acrimonious post-election conference, Trump and Clinton strategists agree only on anger at the media. Even then, not really. Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump's campaign manager, and Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, before a forum at Harvard last night. (Charles Krupa/AP) BY JAMES HOHMANN with Breanne Deppisch THE BIG IDEA: CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Donald Trump’s former campaign manager thinks the editor of the New York Times should be imprisoned for wanting to publish the president-elect’s tax returns. Corey Lewandowski made this caustic declaration Thursday afternoon during a panel discussion at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, as he argued with six top officials from Hillary Clinton’s campaign about who benefited more from media coverage that both sides see as horribly flawed. After every presidential election since 1972, the top advisers to both major party nominees gather for a postmortem to discuss what they were thinking behind the scenes at key moments. The transcripts of these sessions go to libraries, and historians use them for research. But the two-day symposium here, just like the campaign it was convened to discuss, devolved into name calling and a shouting match. It ran headlong into two of the biggest fault lines in American life: race and gender. And it underscored just how alarmingly polarized the country remains three weeks after one of the nastiest political campaigns in American history. In 2012, it was easy for the professionals who worked for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to antiseptically dissect the race together. But 2016 is different: The wounds are still too fresh for Clinton’s advisers – who had been measuring the drapes in the West Wing. Trump’s strategists are still riding too high on the endorphins of a victory – which caught even most of them by surprise – to reflect soberly. (Karen Tumulty and Philip Rucker have a blow-by-blow in their spot story, which you can read here.) -- Unlike previous iterations of the Harvard conference, both sides focused heavily on attacking the press – often in ways that were removed from reality and at times seemingly designed to avoid taking responsibility for their own blunders. Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri lambasted the coverage of her candidate’s homebrew email server. “It is going to go down in history as the most grossly over-rated, over-covered and most destructive story in all of presidential politics,” she said. “If I made one mistake, it was legitimizing the way the press covered this storyline.” Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook then insisted that reporters did not press Trump very hard for refusing to release his tax returns. “Oh my God, that question was vomited to me every day on TV,” said Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s third and final manager, rolling her eyes. Clinton chief strategist Joel Benenson replied, “The number of stories about his tax returns paled in comparison exponentially to coverage of emails.” That’s when Lewandowski, who remains in touch with Trump as a trusted adviser, noted that New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, during an appearance at Harvard this fall, said he’d risk jail time to publish Trump’s tax returns if the paper obtained them. “He’s willing to commit a felony,” Lewandowski said. “It is egregious. He should be in jail!” Corey Lewandowski arrives at Trump Tower this Tuesday. (Evan Vucci/AP)</p> Corey Lewandowski arrives at Trump Tower this Tuesday. (Evan Vucci/AP) -- In a critique that generated audible groans among the dozens of assembled journalists who covered the 2016 campaign, Lewandowski complained that reporters erred by reporting on what actually Trump said at his events. “This is the problem with the media,” he said, when discussing the proposed Muslim ban. “You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally! The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.” -- Clinton’s people made clear how much they view Lewandowski with utter disdain. “We’re not at a Trump rally, Corey,” Benenson told him when he started talking about how Trump was right to say that people who burn the flag should be stripped of their citizenship. Hillary Clinton disembarks from her plane with Jennifer Palmieri this fall. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post) -- And so it went. Reporters pressed the Clinton team on why they did not talk more about the economy. Palmieri complained that, every time they tried to, the press just wanted her to respond to whatever Trump had just said or tweeted. Then, when she would talk about Trump, pundits would criticize Clinton for not focusing enough on the issues. Jen noted that NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, who was co-moderating the panel, focused on the donnybrook over the Gold Star Khan family during what was supposed to be a jobs- focused bus tour in the days after the Democratic National Convention. “You guys only covered her when she talked about him,” Palmieri complained. -- Even the Trump team marveled at the extent to which reporters chase after whatever their boss tweets. “It was like owning the New York Times without the overhead or the debt,” said Michael Glassner, who was Trump’s deputy campaign manager. Lewandowski said Trump could “change the narrative” with 140 characters.” Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio said a post-election poll showed only 20 percent of voters actually use Twitter, which means that the candidate’s messages could never have broken through without so much amplification by the press. But Trump folks said he needed to use Twitter and other alternative mediums because he was not getting a fair shake from the people assigned to cover him. “The largest super PAC is called the media,” said Trump digital director Brad Parscale. “We had media bias that we had to spend money and energy to push back on and correct the message. … We had to fight media bias and corporate bias.” Robby Mook talks to press aboard the Clinton campaign plane on Oct. 28. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post) -- Mook complained that media coverage of campaign chairman John Podesta’s hacked emails in the final weeks did not sufficiently stress the role that the Russians played in pilfering and distributing them. “It is outrageous … It has got be investigated,” Mook said of Russia’s meddling. “We know the Russians were propagating fake news.” “The biggest piece of fake news in this election was that Donald Trump couldn’t win,” replied Conway. Asked if she believes the U.S. intelligence community that Russia was behind much of the mischief, she said: “I’m not going to assume it’s true.” “It is a fact! … It is true,” replied Mook. “We’re not pro-foreign government interference, if that’s what you’re asking,” Conway clarified. Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, arrives to meet with Trump at Trump Tower on Nov. 21. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters) -- The head of CNN also came under particularly intense fire. The campaign managers for all of Trump’s Republican primary rivals were also invited to this conference, and they made themselves known during a dinner on Wednesday night. During a panel discussion with media heavyweights, Jeff Zucker called it “bull***t” to blame his cable channel for elevating Trump back in 2015 when he first got into the race. Veterans of the GOP campaigns which Trump vanquished began to yell from the audience, especially about CNN airing live footage of an empty podium where Trump was about to speak while mostly ignoring whatever they were doing. Zucker claimed that his producers let other candidates call in to the network, rather than requiring them to appear on camera. (Not true, a few yelled.) He added that Marco Rubio refused to come on the air for 10 weeks because he was upset about a question he’d been asked on abortion. Reporters from print outlets, meanwhile, pressed Zucker on his decision to hire Lewandowski as a paid contributor after he technically got fired by Trump as manager but remained on the campaign payroll and continued to dispense private advice.