White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Tuesday said that President Donald Trump’s tweets are indeed official statements, contrary to recent statements by other officials in Trump’s administration.
“The President is the President of the United States,” Spicer said at his daily press briefing. “So they’re considered official statements by the President of the United States.”
In recent days, White House officials have downplayed the importance of Trump’s tweets, which the President often uses to air more unfiltered opinions than those given out by his administration’s press shop. On Monday, Trump lashed out at his own Justice Department for offering a “watered down, politically correct” version of his executive order barring travel to the United States from a handful of majority-Muslim countries.
Top aide Kellyanne Conway claimed the same day that the media has an “obsession with covering everything he says on Twitter, and very little of what he does as President.” She denied that tweeting is Trump’s favored method of communication.
“That’s not true,” Conway said, though Trump has not given any interviews since early May.
“Is President Trump at all concerned that his tweets could be used against him at the level of the Supreme Court when the ACLU takes on this travel ban case?” One America News Network reporter Trey Yingst asked Spicer on Tuesday.
Spicer did not say whether Trump is worried that his off-the-cuff tweeting may undermine his legal argument for the ban, as it has several times already.
“I think we’ve made it clear with respect to that that the courts should follow the law,” he said. “And I think the danger is real, the law is clear and there is no question that we should prevail at the Supreme Court.”
