Sean Spicer is scheduled to hold a press briefing at 1:30 pm ET.
It’s his first press briefing since the gaggle held on Friday following Donald Trump’s speech at CPAC from which the NYT, CNN, BuzzFeed, the L.A. Times, and Politico were barred.
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In some related Spicer news, Axios reports that “White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer personally picked up the phone and connected outside officials with reporters to try to discredit a New York Times article about Trump campaign aides’ contact with Russia, then remained on the line for the brief conversations.”
Spicer is also conducting random phone checks of his own staff overseen by White House lawyers, Politico reports:
Upon entering Spicer’s office for what one person briefed on the gathering described as “an emergency meeting,” staffers were told to dump their phones on a table for a “phone check,” to prove they had nothing to hide.
Spicer, who consulted with White House counsel Don McGahn before calling the meeting, was accompanied by White House lawyers in the room, according to multiple sources.
There, he explicitly warned staffers that using texting apps like Confide — an encrypted and screenshot-protected messaging app that automatically deletes texts after they are sent — and Signal, another encrypted messaging system, was a violation of the Presidential Records Act, according to multiple sources in the room.
