A reporter hit back at the White House with a stinging response Tuesday, saying "I don't apologize at all" following his now-public text spat with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
"I routinely say that the president lies, he does… I don’t apologize for that at all," HuffPost senior White House correspondent S.V. Dáte told CNN anchor Boris Sanchez during a live broadcast.
Dáte described how he messaged Leavitt with a question about why President Donald Trump chose Budapest to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and how she responded, saying, "Your mom did."
"Is the president aware of the significance of Budapest? In 1994, Russia promised, in Budapest, not to invade Ukraine if it gave up the nuclear weapons it inherited when the Soviet Union dissolved," Dáte wrote in a text message. "Does he not see why Ukraine might object to that site? Who suggested Budapest?"
"Your mom did," Leavitt responded.
"Is this funny to you?" Dáte shot back.
"It's funny to me that you actually consider yourself a journalist," Leavitt wrote back. "You are a far left hack that nobody takes seriously."
Leavitt has since gone public, attacking and insulting the journalist. It's now uncertain whether that meeting in question will happen — it appears to be postponed following preliminary conversations between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, who apparently reached no agreement.
The reporter said he was surprised by Leavitt's reaction.
"Well, the kind of response that I got is an aberration, because normally she just ignores all my questions, as does the press office, by the way. And these are the type of questions that, you know, I'm emailing them or texting them or trying to go in and talk to them pretty much several times a week, because that's every time I write a story about the White House. You know, that's our job is to ask. And by the way, she is the press secretary for the White House. So this would be a person I would want to ask," Dáte said.
He added that he does not harass or bombard her.
"Every time I have a question that I send to the White House press office, I also send it to her in case one of them chooses to respond," Dáte said.
Dáte has written a book called "The Useful Idiot: How Donald Trump Killed the Republican Party with Racism, the Rest of Us with Coronavirus, And Why We Aren’t Done With Him Yet."
"When I started covering Donald Trump in 2015, I did not know him at all," he added. "You know, New York real estate is not a thing that I ever covered. But everything that I've learned about him and having covered his campaign and his presidency, the views I have about Donald Trump now are those that have come from my reporting and from my watching him and from my experience."
He explained what he's found over the past near-decade reporting on Trump.
"And if I don't convey my conclusions about Donald Trump to my audience, then I'm failing them," he said. "I mean, people who are watching CNN or reading HuffPost or The New York Times, for that matter, they shouldn't be expected to just get stenography and then go back and do all the historical research on what this man has said and done in the past before. I mean, I routinely say that the president lies. He does, he does. What can I do? I mean, that's who he is. And so I don't apologize for that at all."
Dáte described where the book title originated.
"In fact, the 'Useful Idiot,' the title, of course, is from an old Russian phrase about people who, you know, do things because they're being used by others. And that's honestly, it's what it seemed in the first term. That's what was going on with President Trump," he said.
