CNN still looking for the driver of the white truck.
Via The Hill:
New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt on Friday defended his impromptu interview with President Trump against backlash from readers who said he should have pressed the president harder.
“Some readers criticized my approach, saying I should have asked more follow-up questions,” Schmidt wrote in the Times’s “Insider” section. “I believed it was more important to continue to allow the president to speak and let people make their own judgments about his statements.”
Schmidt’s interview with Trump at his Florida golf course made headlines Friday, as it was unplanned and unsupervised.
In the interview, Trump said he had the “absolute right” to do whatever he wants with the Justice Department, and also said that he thought special counsel Robert Mueller would be “fair” to him in the investigation into whether his campaign colluded with Russia.[…]
Schmidt wrote in the piece that in a past interview with Trump, he learned that the president can “jump” from issue to issue and go off on tangents, which is why he did not ask more follow-up questions.
“If you try to interrupt him, he often continues talking,” Schmidt wrote. “Given this, I employed a strategy in which I asked questions about the most pressing issues of his presidency and then allowed him to talk.”
Daniel Dale, the Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, also rejected Schmidt’s argument that he needed to let Trump talk without interruption.
“Interviewers can – and do all the time – politely challenge wildly false claims without derailing the whole interview,” he wrote on Twitter.