Wednesday on CNN’s “The Situation Room,” host Wolf Blitzer demanded an apology from the Trump administration for blocking his network’s White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins from a Rose Garden event because the administration allegedly did not like the questions she asked President Donald Trump earlier in the day.
Blitzer said, “It’s something you would expect to see in some totalitarian regime I traveled with—the host government was unhappy that White House correspondents were shouting questions. They would come to us before a briefing, before a photo opportunity, and say no questions allowed and we would always say the same thing—they don’t have to answer the questions, but our job is to represent the American news media and ask those questions. You don’t like it. You don’t have to answer the questions.”
He added, “I would like to see Bill Shine, the Deputy White House Chief of Staff in charge of communications who reprimanded Kaitlan Collins, I would like to see him formally, publicly apologize to her. I don’t know if he was ordered to do so by the president or if he just did it on his own—there has to be an apology to Kaitlan Collins. And Kaitlan wasn’t just representing CNN. She was representing ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX, all of the television networks. She was the pool reporter. She was doing her job. They should know better.”
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