Kayleigh McEnany, conducting the first briefing by a White House press secretary since March 2019, said Friday she will be conducting press updates on a more regular basis and will always tell the truth.
“I will never lie to you, you have my word on that,” she told reporters, adding on briefings: “We do plan to continue these.”
Ms. McEnany’s predecessor, Stephanie Grisham, never conducted a formal briefing during her tenure.
President Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, used the briefing room and so did his successor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, though the briefings ended during her tenure in early 2019.
Mr. Trump dusted off the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room amid the coronavirus crisis and briefed the press almost daily from early March to late April, though he’s scaled back of late in favor of White House events focused on reopening the economy.
He fields questions from reporters in the daily pool during those events.
Ms. McEnany’s first briefing lasted roughly a half-hour. She fielded questions from reporters sprinkled throughout the room, which is still sparsely populated due to social distancing rules amid the pandemic.
The session was civil, though Ms. McEnany pressed reporters over the emerging controversy around how the FBI treated Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn.”This was a grave miscarriage of justice,” she said.
She tried to throw questions back at reporters and see whether they were outraged, too.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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