CNN Reliable Sources: “”The Trump White House is the most transparent in history,” it says, while removing a database of official transcripts documenting President Trump‘s announcements and appearances. The “remarks” section of the White House website now features YouTube videos rather than the transcripts that have been published by past administrations for decades. It’s yet another example of the White House trying to exert more control. Rather than printing every transcript, thus creating a comprehensive record for the public, the White House is selectively publicizing some events and skipping others. HuffPost’s S.V. Date, who observed that the administration was cutting back on Trump transcripts earlier this spring, wrote last week that the White House was “excluding many of his most unhinged comments” from its website. In response, WH comms director Steven Cheung told Date to “stop beclowning yourself.” Now the transcripts have been removed altogether, with one exception: Trump’s inaugural address. “Government stenographers are still recording and transcribing Trump’s remarks,” NBC reported yesterday. The records just aren’t being posted. The YouTube videos are not really a replacement because many of Trump’s events are not being archived in video form, either. “Also missing are videos of Trump’s various interactions with the media,” NBC noted. Those exchanges are still being transcribed, too, but the White House is not posting the documents.
HuffPost: “If you’re interested in finding Donald Trump’s precise words as he lied about his failed coup attempt in his Jan. 20 remarks at the U.S. Capitol soon after his inaugural speech, good luck with that. Same with his Feb. 12 thoughts in the Oval Office on how magnetism, in his view “a new theory,” doesn’t work on the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford. Or his statements in the Feb. 28 meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, berating the Ukrainian president and empathizing with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin instead. Ditto with his April 14 explanation of how well he is doing with “the cognitive” compared to previous occupants of the White House. The self-proclaimed “most transparent” White House in history, as it turns out, has little interest in making the vast majority of Trump’s speeches and interactions with journalists readily accessible to the public whose taxes pay for their transcription, publishing just 29 transcripts of the 146 public remarks Trump made in his first 100 days in office. Trump’s White House posted transcripts for only 11 of the 40 speeches in which Trump did not take questions from the media, and for only one of his six formal news conferences, according to a HuffPost review. And of the 98 media “availabilities” in which Trump took questions from reporters informally — a practice that his aides point to as proof of his great accessibility — only 15 of the transcripts have been made public. Previous White Houses, going back decades, made all of the transcripts compiled by the non-political stenography office, staffed by career civil servants, available in printed form, via email and on the White House website, as a matter of course. Trump’s first-term staff also published all his remarks, with the exception of his speeches at rallies and fundraisers. Trump’s second-term White House stopped emailing transcripts to its press list just five days after taking office, and of late has largely stopped posting them on the website, too. As of Thursday morning, the last transcript from Trump on the site is from March 13…”
