The president of the Association of correspondents at the White House, Weijia Jiang, described this decision “deeply disturbing” in a press release, and requested the reintegration of the Wall Street Journal.
On Friday, Donald Trump had already attacked the Wall Street Journal in defamation and his boss Rupert Murdoch after the publication of an article attributing to him a Salace letter addressed to Jeffrey Epstein, an embarrassing revelation for the Republican President.
He is indeed accused by some of his supporters of not keeping his promises of transparency about this rich financier to the abundant address book, charged for sexual trafficking in minors in 2019 and which was found dead in his prison cell before being tried.
Since the return to power of Donald Trump in January, the White House, among other attacks against the press, has taken over the composition of the “pool”, the small group of journalists who follows the president as close as possible, in particular on his plane, and until then organized by the media themselves via the association of correspondents with the White House.
For example, the American executive has dismissed the prestigious American agency Associated Press, a historic pillar of the “pool”, because it continues to use the name “Gulf of Mexico” and not that of “American Gulf” wanted by the American president.
The White House, on the other hand, invited for some trips to influencers and content creators claiming to be the “Maga” movement (Make America Great Again).
The death of Jeffrey Epstein fueled a number of conspiracy theories that he was murdered to prevent revelations involving leading personalities.
Figures close to the Trumpist movement has been campaigning for years for the publication of a supposed list of customers of this friend of stars and powerful, of which Donald Trump was close.
But on July 7, the Ministry of Justice and the Federal Police, the FBI, assured that there was no evidence of the existence of such a list or blackmail towards certain personalities, aroused a surge of furious messages coming from “maga” accounts on social networks.