An hour after he trumpeted Thursday’s abrupt end of the second U.S.-North Korea summit, CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta appeared in need of a safe space following President Trump’s Hanoi press conference. Acosta wasn’t called on, so he aired his grievances on CNN while falsely suggesting the President had “steered clear largely” of the White House press corps.
Acosta couldn’t even begin with the substance of the press conference, instead complaining to CNN International and PBS host Christiane Amanpour and CNN Newsroom’s Jim Sciutto that “we have to point out the obvious, which is the President steered clear largely during this news conference of the White House press corps and was instead selecting journalists at random from the other side of the room where there were foreign journalists seated.”
Without the facts on his side, Acosta doubled down, not pointing out the fact that this has become par for the course with Trump press conferences:
He didn’t even know who he was calling on. At times, he was calling on reporters from Russian state media, Chinese state media, Sean Hannity from Fox, and largely just avoiding taking questions from the White House press corps. I think that was by design. That was because he didn't want to really answer the questions about Michael Cohen.