The White House on Wednesday suspended the press pass of a CNN reporter who \u00a0sparred with Donald Trump at a news conference, during which the president branded him the \u201cenemy of the people.\u201d<\/p>\n
A visibly angry Trump called reporter Jim Acosta a \u201crude, terrible person,\u201d after the CNN White House correspondent refused the president\u2019s orders to sit down and yield the microphone during the conference one day after the US midterm election.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe White House is suspending the hard pass of the reporter involved until further notice,\u201d said White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders hours later, referring to Acosta, who then tweeted that he had been denied White House entry.<\/p>\n
The heated exchange began after Acosta clung to the microphone and persisted with questions about the president\u2019s repeated and angry denunciation of a caravan of poor Central American migrants making their way through Mexico to the US border. He asked Trump why he has characterized it as an invasion.<\/p>\n
Trump said \u201cthat\u2019s enough!\u201d and a White House intern tried in vain to take the microphone from the CNN journalist.<\/p>\n
\u201cPresident Trump believes in a free press and expects and welcomes tough questions of him and his Administration,\u201d Sanders said in her statement.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will, however, never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern. This conduct is absolutely unacceptable,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Acosta shot back at the accusation of misconduct, tweeting \u201cthis is a lie\u201d \u2014 as his network and a number of Washington journalists who had been at the press conference voiced support for him and denied the White House allegations that he touched the intern.<\/p>\n
\u201cSecretary Sanders lied,\u201d CNN said in a statement, saying the press pass suspension was \u201cdone in retaliation for challenging questions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sanders \u201cprovided fraudulent accusations and cited an incident that never happened,\u201d the US cable network said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis unprecedented decision is a threat to our democracy and the country deserves better. Jim Acosta has our full support.\u201d<\/p>\n
(AFP)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The White House on Wednesday suspended the press pass of a CNN reporter who \u00a0sparred with Donald Trump at a news conference, during which the president branded him the \u201cenemy of the people.\u201d A visibly angry Trump called reporter Jim Acosta a \u201crude, terrible person,\u201d after the CNN White House correspondent refused the president\u2019s orders […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2558,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1896,633,1894,1895],"class_list":["post-2557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-cnn-reporter","tag-donald-trump","tag-jim-acosta","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2557"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2557"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2559,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2557\/revisions\/2559"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}