Karoline Leavitt to be Donald Trump’s White House press secretary, youngest ever in role
U.S. president-elect Donald Trump reached into his inner circle on Friday and chose his transition spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, as his White House press secretary, putting a 27-year-old firebrand in position to aggressively defend him.
Leavitt has endeared herself to Trump by her ardent defence of him in news interviews and her take-no-prisoners style, Trump advisers said.
The job of the White House press secretary typically is to help inform the American people about presidential activities without betraying the confidence of the boss.
“I have the utmost confidence she will excel at the podium, and help deliver our message to the American People as we, ‘Make America Great Again,'” Trump said in a statement.
The challenge for Leavitt will be to impart reliable information and gain credibility with reporters, while maintaining strong loyalty to Trump.
U.S. president-elect Donald Trump has chosen noted vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy’s previously expressed views on vaccines and the pharmaceutical industry have alarmed health experts.
Leavitt will be the youngest person to ever hold the title of White House press secretary. Ron Ziegler was the previous youngest press secretary at age 29 when then-president Richard Nixon gave him the position in 1969.
Served during Trump’s 1st term
A New Hampshire native, Leavitt was an assistant press secretary during the latter part of Trump’s first term from 2017 to 2021.
When Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in 2020, Leavitt became communications director for Rep. Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican, who has been tapped by Trump as his U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Leavitt ran for a seat in the House of Representatives from New Hampshire in 2022, winning the Republican primary. She lost the general election to Democrat Chris Pappas, but the experience appeared to give her valuable experience at public speaking.
She joined Trump’s 2024 campaign and has been the chief spokesperson for the president-elect’s transition team.
Trump had 4 press secretaries in prior term
Biden has had two press secretaries over four years: Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre.
Trump, a close observer of those who defend him and whether they are tough enough, had four press secretaries during his 2017-21 term: Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephanie Grisham and Kayleigh McEnany.
Spicer ran afoul of the White House press corps at his first appearance in January 2017 with the false claim that the crowd gathered in Washington for Trump’s inauguration was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.”
Photographic proof showed otherwise and the uproar continued for days. Spicer eventually lost Trump’s confidence and the president switched to Sanders, who got praise from him for her parrying with the press corps. She is now the Republican governor of Arkansas.
After Sanders left, Trump turned to Grisham, who never held a briefing, which she said was at Trump’s direction. She eventually went back to work for Trump’s wife, Melania Trump. Grisham resigned after the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and is now a sharp Trump critic.
Trump’s last chief spokesperson at the White House was McEnany, who sparred with reporters during the pandemic year of 2020 and is now an on-air personality at Fox News.
Published at Fri, 01 Nov 2024 08:11:21 +0000
The Onion’s purchase of Infowars under review after Alex Jones and his lawyers complain
The Onion’s winning bid for Alex Jones’s Infowars platform is under review by a U.S. federal bankruptcy judge after Jones and his lawyers complained about how an auction was conducted.
The satirical news outlet was announced as the winning bidder on Thursday in an auction that is part of Jones’s personal bankruptcy.
Hours later, Infowars headquarters in Austin, Texas, and its websites were shut down and Jones was broadcasting from a new studio he had set up before the bankruptcy auction. By Friday morning, Infowars and its websites were back up and running for reasons that were not entirely clear.
At a hastily called court hearing in Houston on Thursday, Judge Christopher Lopez ordered another hearing to be held next week. He wants to know what happened with the auction and how the bankruptcy trustee chose The Onion over the only other bidder — a company affiliated with a Jones product-selling website.
A court hearing is typically held after a bankruptcy auction to finalize the winning bids and sales, and to hear any objections, so the process in Jones’s case hasn’t strayed far from the usual — yet.
Here’s a look at the bankruptcy auction and what could happen next:
Why was Infowars up for auction?
Jones declared personal bankruptcy in late 2022 after he was ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion US to families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut who sued him for defamation for repeatedly calling the massacre a hoax aimed at increasing gun control.
Relatives of some of the 20 first graders and six educators who were killed in the 2012 shooting said Jones’ followers harassed and threatened them as a result of his lies. Jones has since acknowledged the shooting was “100 per cent real.”
As part of the bankruptcy, Jones’s personal assets and the parent company of Infowars, the Jones-owned Free Speech Systems, were to be sold at auction, with the Sandy Hook families and Jones’s other creditors getting the proceeds.
How The Onion was named the winning bidder
The bankruptcy trustee overseeing the sale chose from sealed bids. He received two.
One was from the Jones-affiliated First United American Companies, which offered $3.5 million US, the trustee revealed in court Thursday. The other, from The Onion, was lower but contained an incentive by some of the Sandy Hook families to forgo a portion of the sale proceeds and give it to other Jones’s creditors, the trustee, Christopher Murray, said.
Murray said he determined The Onion’s offer, although unusual, was better overall, because it would provide more money to Jones’s creditors than the other bid. But he also said he could not yet put a dollar figure on The Onion’s bid when the families’ offer was factored in.
The judge indicated that he had expected prospective buyers would be given a chance to outbid each other after the bids were unsealed.
His 20-page order on the sale procedures in September, however, made such a bidding round optional. And it gave broad authority to Murray to conduct the sale, including the power to reject any bid, no matter how high, that was “contrary to the best interests” of Jones, his company and their creditors.
Infowars reopens after shutting down
Murray had the Infowars website and studio shut down Thursday as he began the process of securing assets, a lawyer for the trustee said in court Thursday. But on Friday, Infowars and its websites were back up and running.
On his show, Jones told listeners that Murray had told him it was wrong to shut down Infowars before the sale was finalized. Murray and his lawyer did not immediately return phone messages and emails seeking comment.
What’s next in court?
The judge said he had concerns about the auction process and transparency. Both sides are expected to present evidence at next week’s hearing.
Jones and a lawyer for First United American Companies allege Murray improperly selected The Onion’s bid and unexpectedly changed the sale process Monday after the sealed bids were submitted, by deciding not to hold a round of bidding on Wednesday. They also questioned the legality of The Onion’s bid.
Murray said denied doing anything improper and said he followed the judge’s auction rules.
Lopez would rule on whether the trustee properly ran the auction and selected The Onion as the winning bidder. If not, the possibilities include reopening the sale and holding an auction where potential buyers could outbid each other. The judge has the ultimate authority to accept or reject any sale of Infowars.
An exact date for the hearing had not yet been scheduled by Friday afternoon.
What are The Onion’s plans for Infowars?
The Onion — which carries the banner of “America’s Finest News Source” on its masthead — was founded in the 1980s and for decades has skewered politics and pop culture. It hopes to reopen the Infowars website in January as a parody of Jones and other conspiracy theorists.
“Our goal in a couple of years is for people to think of Infowars as the funniest and dumbest website that exists,” Ben Collins, the Onion’s CEO, told The Associated Press.
“It was previously the dumbest website that exists.”
Published at Fri, 15 Nov 2024 23:55:42 +0000
