As usual, seems that White House press secretary Sean Spicer was the last to know about President Donald Trump’s sudden firing of FBI Director James Comey yesterday afternoon. A report in this morning’s Washington Post details the lengths to which Spicer and his staff went to avoid having to confront reporters on the issue, and the whole thing reads a bit like a special Halloween episode of Veep.
It seems Spicer was originally planning on revealing the firing in an emailed statement, but some sort of technical issue prevented him from sending it fast enough. So he did the reasonable thing and shouted the news to reporters who happened to be hanging out outside his office at the time, then immediately retreated to his office and locked the door. Several hours later, with Spicer’s barricaded office inundated with journalists and members of Congress demanding answers, he and two White House spokespeople—including Kellyanne Conway, who ended up prompting an eye roll from CNN’s Anderson Cooper—”were suddenly speed-walking up the White House drive,” as WaPo puts it, on their way to cable news interviews.
Naturally, the media followed. And after the TV segments were done, Spicer literally hid with his staff behind a tall hedge trying to decide what to do. (Oh, to have been a spider in that hedge.) “After Spicer spent several minutes hidden in the bushes behind these sets,” as a major American newspaper writes of a senior White House official, he emerged, told reporters to turn their lights and cameras off, and answered questions in the dark, between two bushes, for about 10 minutes.
The A.V. Club has obtained exclusive video of the event, which you can see below.