Center for Strategic and International Studies Bob Schieffer’s “About the News” with H. Andrew Schwartz Podcast Subject: “Freewheeling White House: Politico's Annie Karni” Speaker: Annie Karni, White House Correspondent, Politico Hosts: H. Andrew Schwartz, Senior Vice President for External Relations, CSIS Bob Schieffer, CBS Political News Contributor; Former Host, “Face the Nation,” CBS News Date: Wednesday, June 7, 2017 Transcript By Superior Transcriptions LLC www.superiortranscriptions.com (Music plays.) BOB SCHIEFFER: I’m Bob Schieffer. H. ANDREW SCHWARTZ: And I’m Andrew Schwartz. MR. SCHIEFFER: And these are conversations about the news. We are in the midst of a communications revolution. We have access to more information than any people in history. But are we more informed, or just overwhelmed by so much information we can’t process it? MR. SCHWARTZ: These conversations are a year-long collaboration of the Bob Schieffer College of Communication at Texas Christian University and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. (Music plays.) MR. SCHIEFFER: Our guest this time is Annie Karni. She is formerly of The New York Post, The New York Daily News. She is with Politico now, covering the White House. So, what’s the difference in working with a New York tab and working for Politico? ANNIE KARNI: Not that much, actually. Some of my colleagues at Politico joked to me that I was really going to my third tab, and that kind of Politico is to Washington what The New York Post is to New York City. And that we need to make Trump understand that a little bit. He doesn’t really read the internet, which makes him focus less on us than he does on The New York Times or The Washington Post, because they don’t use the internet and we’re only on the internet. But it really is kind of the same quick hits, nothing is too small to be a story. You know, that’s – you know, we will – something that might be a detail in a story in one of broadsheet papers will be a standalone story for us. So it’s—I think it’s very good training for Politico. A lot of former tabloid people have been very successful at Politico. MR. SCHIEFFER: So you covered Hillary Clinton’s campaign, but this is your really first White House cover. MS. KARNI: It is. MR. SCHIEFFER: So you really have nothing to compare it to. MS. KARNI: That’s true. MR. SCHIEFFER: But Maggie Haberman of the Times, who actually worked for the Post at one point, said that while a lot of people were taken aback, for example, at Donald Trump’s first news conference, she said she and Glenn Thrush, who also comes from the New York tabloid work, said they kind of took it stride. It was like going to a Giuliani new conference or an Ed Koch news conference, when they were mayors. How did you find it? MS. KARNI: Right. Well, I was a slightly different generation of New York reporter from those two. Like, my mayors were Bloomberg and de Blasio. Bloomberg was a pretty different character from Donald Trump. But it is, in the sense of the freewheelingness of how the Trump White House runs doesn’t seem that crazy to me. And I’ve talked to some of my colleagues at the White House who, like, have been part of the White House Correspondents Association for a long time, who have done multiple administration, who are coming off the Obama administration. And they will find changes in protocol to be, like, so jarring to them. Like, I don’t – you know, like, I can’t believe that they didn’t do a pool spray in the morning on this event, or that they wouldn’t have had Trump make comments on top of, like, react to a terrorist attack on top of his comments here rather than here. Like, that’s just crazy. And I’m like, well, I don’t even know that’s the way it’s supposed to be done. So that doesn’t seem that crazy to me. And I think that sometimes not having the experience to know the protocols is good in this administration, because that’s not the part that is crazy about Donald Trump’s presidency. So not to get bogged down in that can be helpful. MR. SCHIEFFER: You know, and I would go beyond that. I would say, just sometimes not knowing the protocol can be very helpful to a reporter. MS. KARNI: Yeah. Yeah. MR. SCHIEFFER: I can remember – (laughs) – you know, walking into rooms up at the Capitol and people would say: You’re not supposed to be here. You know, I’d say, well, I didn’t know that. (Laughs.) MS. KARNI: Right, right. So not knowing how it’s supposed to be done, like, kind of is helpful. MR. SCHWARTZ: Well, tell our listeners what a pool spray is. MS. KARNI: A pool spray, I think – (laughs) – I’m not even 100 percent sure yet – it’s when Donald Trump will – for instance, he’ll be sitting down with first responders to some incident that happened that he invited to the White House. They’ll be all in the Roosevelt Room around a big table. And the media – the pool – like, so, like, a bunch of cameras and one print reporter and one – a few photographers will be brought in, take pictures. One thing that Donald Trump does differently is he usually starts talking to the – he will take a few questions during those. Usually it’s they sit there, we get our – we get our photo. MR. SCHWARTZ: Yeah, they’re news opportunities, or can be. MS. KARNI: He says – usually it’ll be an opportunity for him to say, you know, what a great job these first responders have done, and then we leave. But Donald Trump often will take the bait. So it is a news opportunity because if you yell at him, like, you know, why did you order the strike on Syria, he’ll answer sometimes. Or, like, do you still have faith in Jared Kushner? Like sometimes he doesn’t, but a lot of times he’ll engage. So they are news opportunities. MR. SCHIEFFER: You know, some of those protocols that have sort of been in place, a lot of people say, well, has it always been that way? And the fact is, it hasn’t always been that way. H.R. Halderman, who was Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, I guess, really invented the modern campaign. I mean, he was the one that organized when you’d have a press plane going to someplace, he had a White House travel office that took care of the luggage and all of that. He was the one that invented the so-called photo op, which some people now call the pool spray, where photographers would come in and take a picture, but the reporters were not supposed to answer – or ask questions. The organized press briefing is organized as it has become, putting a lid on at night, which means that we’re not going to make any more news today and everybody can go home. MR. SCHWARTZ: We’re going to have to do a whole glossary. MR. SCHIEFFER: Yeah, so many of those practices came out of the Nixon White House. They were very good at organizing. Not very good at understanding what the Constitution required. (Laughter.) So that was that. MS. KARNI: It’s just so much part of the process, you don’t think about someone having invented photo op. MR. SCHIEFFER: Yeah, but it has so much to do with how we – how we get the news. MS. KARNI: Yeah. MR. SCHIEFFER: Let me ask you this, you and your colleagues reported that Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie – Lewandowski, of course, at one point during the campaign was Donald Trump’s campaign manager. Bossie is a long-time conservative activist. Both were campaign aides. It had been expected that they might join the administration and head up some sort of a war room to handle all these questions about the Russian connection in all of that. But you’re saying now that that’s not going to happen and there’s not going to be a war room, at least for now. Tell us about that. MS. KARNI: Yeah, it looks like those two are not going to go in. And the thinking was that, from what I understand, that Trump wasn’t totally sold on having a war room internally. And they kind of – and Bannon and company kind of realized that the whole – what they want to do with this Russia stuff is really separate it out and not have to answer questions about it. So having an internal war room kind of defeats the purpose of having a war room. They really need it to be external and to be run by the lawyers. Like, Sean Spicer wants to be able to say at the briefing when he gets a Russia question, you know, Kasowitz is handling all of that. MR. SCHIEFFER: Kasowitz being the president’s personal lawyer. MS. KARNI: Yeah, or, you know, we have – so-and-so is handling that. That’s outside of my purview. MR. SCHWARTZ: And Kasowitz is in New York. MS. KARNI: Yes. So if they have an internal war room they want to just put it somewhere else that doesn’t have to slow them down.