New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt on Friday defended his impromptu interview with President Trump
Donald John TrumpHouse Democrat slams Donald Trump Jr. for ‘serious case of amnesia’ after testimony Skier Lindsey Vonn: I don’t want to represent Trump at Olympics Poll: 4 in 10 Republicans think senior Trump advisers had improper dealings with Russia MORE 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’ “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
Robert Swan MuellerSasse: US should applaud choice of Mueller to lead Russia probe MORE would be “fair” to him in the investigation into whether his campaign colluded with Russia.
He also repeated at least 15 times during the interview that there was “no collusion” between the campaign and Russia.
"It is unusual to land an interview with the president, but even more rare for a reporter to get him one-on-one,” Schmidt wrote. “I knew that what I was doing was not going to go over well with the White House press office, which hates being blindsided by the president making news. But for much of the next half-hour, Mr. Trump and I sat alone.”
One fellow journalist raising doubts about Schmidt's approach was Nate Silver, editor of the blog FiveThirtyEight, which was previously under the Times' umbrella. He posted on Twitter that the "argument for asking follow-up questions when you actually get a chance to interview Trump is that he reveals his inner monologue all the time on Twitter anyway."
One argument for asking follow-up questions when you actually get a chance to interview Trump is that he reveals his inner monologue all the time on Twitter anyway. The marginal value of publishing a one-way conversation would be higher if he were more reserved on this forum. https://t.co/ZsdNrI3SQQ
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) December 29, 2017
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, had 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.
Very respectfully, I don’t think it’s a choice between “let Trump say anything he wants” and “play prosecutor and interrupt constantly.” Interviewers can - and do all the time - politely challenge wildly false claims without derailing the whole interview. https://t.co/RGSvohQbRd
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) December 29, 2017
-Updated 8:39 p.m.