NBC's Andrea Mitchell Says She's Never Seen Such A Lying White House In Her Long Career

Veteran reporter Andrea Mitchell, NBC News chief foreign affairs correspondent and host of MSNBC's 'Andrea Mitchell Reports' spares no words in her new interview for The Global Politico weekly podcast on world affairs in the Trump era.

Mitchell has covered every US president since Jimmy Carter and she declares that Trump is the most hostile to the press she's ever seen. Same for telling the truth, says the 70-year-old breast cancer survivor who outpaces reporters half her age. Mitchell is pushing back hard against a White House staff using the briefing room as a daily disinformation machine. Both the president and secretary of state are making every attempt to undermine the ability of reporters to do their job, says Mitchell. 

“It is totally sui generis. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mitchell says. “I have never seen anything like this where people just flat-out lie. You know, black is white and white is black, and they mislead you. It's really disconcerting to see the podium in the White House briefing room being used to mislead or misdirect or obfuscate.”

And then there’s the matter of Tillerson and his outright refusal to talk to reporters like Mitchell who’ve spent a lifetime on the diplomatic beat—and won’t even be bringing the usual complement of journalists along when he heads to Moscow for a crucial first visit this week amid escalating tensions over Trump’s airstrike on Russia proxy Syria. “There is just an attempt, and it’s successful, to shut down not just me but The New York Times, The Washington Post, Agence France-Presse, CNN. I mean, we're all just shut out,” Mitchell says. “You should not be flying into Beijing without a press corps. You should not be going to Moscow without the press corps. It's wrong.”

As for charges that she's a Clinton hack, I loathe the woman over her interviews with Clinton, ones that had a single focus: emails, emails, emails. If Andrea Mitchell is pro-Clinton, I'm the Queen of England. ~ Anne