Reporter feuding with Leavitt: ‘The president lies’
HuffPost reporter S.V. Dáte, who has feuded with the White House press office in recent days, is defending his reporting on President Trump in response to attacks from the president’s allies over his objectivity.
“The views I have about Donald Trump now are those that have come from my reporting and from my watching him and from my experience. And if I don’t convey my conclusions about Donald Trump to my audience, then I’m failing them,” Dáte said Tuesday during an appearance on CNN.
“I mean, people who are watching CNN, reading Huff Post or The New York Times, doesn’t matter. They shouldn’t be expected to just get stenography and then go back and do all the historical research on what this man has said and done in the past before.”
Dáte, who authored a book about Trump titled “The Useful Idiot: How Donald Trump Killed the Republican Party with Racism and the Rest of Us with Coronavirus,” defended what he characterized as his responsibility to call out Trump for misleading statements.
“I routinely say that the president lies. He does … What can I do? I mean, that’s who he is, and so I don’t apologize for that at all,” the reporter said.
Dáte’s comments, which were first highlighted by Mediaite, came after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt published on social media a testy exchange she and Dáte had over text messages.
In the messages, Dáte asks Leavitt if Trump was aware of the significance of choosing Budapest as a potential meeting spot with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He suggested Ukraine might reject Budapest as a site and asked her who suggested the city as a meeting place.
“Your mom did,” replied Leavitt.
“For context, S.V. Dáte of the Huffington Post is not a journalist interested in the facts. He is a left-wing hack who has consistently attacked President Trump for years and constantly bombards my phone with Democrat talking points,” Leavitt wrote in her social media post publicizing the back-and-forth. “Activists who masquerade as real reporters do a disservice to the profession.”