A former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer turned Harvard academic is demanding that CNN commentator Scott Jennings be barred from the White House press podium—and the silence from the establishment press tells you everything about who they think gets to speak in this country.
The Daily Beast published an op-ed by a Harvard dual-degree student who took a course co-taught by Jennings and Clinton's 2016 campaign manager Robby Mook. The author's solution to encountering a Republican in an Ivy League classroom? Write a public piece insisting he "should be nowhere near the White House podium." The author previously worked on Clinton's digital team at the campaign's Brooklyn headquarters.
The case against Jennings rests on his Bush-era record. As a special assistant to the president, Jennings wrote that the White House should "move forward with getting rid" of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, who had angered Republicans by not pursuing voter-fraud cases aggressively enough. The Justice Department Inspector General later concluded those political complaints—not performance issues—were the real reason Iglesias was fired. Jennings also used an RNC email account for White House business and invoked executive privilege when subpoenaed by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
All of this is public record. None of it is new. Jennings has been a CNN presence for years. The author's real grievance is that Jennings is an effective Trump defender who gets paid to argue the other side on cable news. The Daily Beast framed him as peddling "ragebait" and exhibiting "ethical rot"—standard language for anyone who dares represent the Republican half of the country on television.
What the author inadvertently reveals is more damning than anything in Jennings's file. The student acknowledges Jennings was "capable," "quick-witted," willing to engage a heavily Democratic classroom, and even criticized Trump after January 6. The author's conclusion: "whatever came later was a choice, not a conviction." In other words, Jennings's real sin is choosing to represent conservatism publicly rather than privately.
Meanwhile, the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and the Chicago Tribune were busy running essentially the same gossip piece about White House "beauty standards"—anonymous staffers complaining about blowouts and Botox under a president who "barely sleeps." Both outlets relied entirely on a Daily Mail interview, with Anthony Scaramucci weighing in to call Trump a misogynist who treats women as "transactions in his field of vision." Neither outlet found space for the blacklist story. Trivialities about Kristi Noem's makeup routine apparently warranted more ink than an explicit attempt to exclude conservative voices from the people's briefing room.
The founders debated who should have access to the levers of public information in those taverns under British rule. Their answer was everyone. The establishment press's answer is: only us, and only the voices we approve.
