The last press briefing from Sarah Huckabee Sanders took place on Sept. 10. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images White House White House press briefings fade amid Kavanaugh crisis Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has become more likely to take her case to television hosts than the White House press corps.

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders responded to Brett Kavanaugh’s angry and emotional testimony on Friday morning — via a television hit with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos from the White House driveway.

Behind a door a hundred or so yards away, the James S. Brady Briefing Room looked like an airport luggage storage room. The famous podium in front of the blue White House seal was surrounded by bags and camera equipment, the front row of seats filled by technicians working crossword puzzles.


Over the past two months, this scene has become the norm. Sanders has relied more on television interviews to push the White House’s message — this week she has spoken with anchors like NBC’s Savannah Guthrie and the hosts of “Fox & Friends” — while bypassing the briefing room. “He was incredibly powerful and very clear and he’s been unequivocal from day one that this did not take place by him,” she told Stephanopoulos Friday morning of Kavanaugh’s Senate Judiciary Committee testimony.

Sanders’s last press briefing took place on Sept. 10, a time when Kavanaugh was still known as a somewhat bland, Bush conservative, Supreme Court shoo-in. “Judge Kavanaugh reinforced the bedrock principles of judicial independence and rule of law,” Sanders said of his testimony that day. “We look forward to the Judiciary Committee completing its review and advancing his nomination.”

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Before that, she hadn’t answered questions from the briefing room podium since August 22, according to CBS News correspondent Mark Knoller, who keeps a log of press briefings. In between, she appeared on the Trump-friendly morning program “Fox & Friends” to respond to questions about journalist Bob Woodward’s book about the Trump White House, “Fear.”

The slow fade out of the daily briefing has coincided with a particularly fraught period for the Trump White House, as Kavanaugh’s nomination has become an epic political crisis and the fate of deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, who oversees Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, appears to hang in the balance. And Trump officials don’t see how it has cost them anything.

As those stories have exploded, the James S. Brady Briefing Room has sat virtually unused. While Sanders has engaged more with network anchors than White House correspondents, the administration has also leaned heavily on counselor Kellyanne Conway to set its tone in cable news hits throughout the Kavanaugh process.

Trump, meanwhile, continues to set his own agenda on Twitter. And on Wednesday, the president held a wide-ranging press conference in New York City — his first unaccompanied by a foreign leader in months — in which he also lashed out at Kavanaugh’s accusers.

The result is a president who already viewed himself as his own press secretary has essentially taken on that role at a critical moment for his administration.

And the principle of a senior White House official being held to account in public for transparency and access to people in positions of power — an essential plank of democracy — is being tested.

“The briefing has important symbolic and substantive value,” said Olivier Knox, president of the White House Correspondents Association. “It’s one of the things that shows Americans that the most powerful institution in our political life is not above being regularly questioned. That makes it worth saving.”

Trump has complained about the daily briefing from the start of his administration, multiple former officials say. He has called it an unnecessary forum for journalists to take public shots at him. His aides have sometimes pushed back, noting that his base loves to see Sanders, a thick-skinned mom with a relatable Southern twang, standing up against a brigade of aggressive reporters. But Trump has insisted that he is better off speaking to reporters at “pool sprays,” i.e. when reporters can yell questions at him at open-press events, or putting out his own views on Twitter.

“The president wants to communicate with the American people in a number of ways,” Sanders said in an email. “Sometimes it’s the briefing, gaggles, Twitter, written statements, interviews, etc. But we connect with people across the country in some way every day.”

Sanders admits that the daily briefing does have its own impact — and that it’s not always a good thing. If she gets peppered with questions about the Russia investigation, for instance, those are the moments cable news often features for the next 24 hours.

For her part, Sanders has in recent months expressed frustration to colleagues about the performative nature of the entire exercise, blaming the repetition of questions on what she views as “grandstanding” by television correspondents.

Sanders, according to people who have discussed the idea with her, has pitched the idea of eliminating the bank of cameras to the left of the podium, which give the back shot of the press asking questions. She has toyed with the idea of creating a single camera shot of the podium to give journalists less screen time.

“We talk about a lot of ideas all the time,” she said in an email.

Mike McCurry, a former press secretary to President Bill Clinton, agreed the briefing loses some of its necessity when reporters wake up to a real-time timeline of the president's thoughts on Twitter.

But its still a valuable exercise, he said — both for the press and democracy, and for the policymakers in the White House.

"In the process of preparing for the briefing, I would say, 'The answers you're giving me here are bullshit. What's our policy?' That process would sharpen up policy making. it actually helped perfect some of our processes. That forced better decision making. You lose that if you're not out there and held accountable every day," McCurry added.

On Friday afternoon, Sanders was working in her office in front of a blazing fire before rushing off to attend a bilateral meeting between Trump and the President of the Republic of Chile. Because it was a day that included a meeting with a foreign leader, no briefing was scheduled.