A freelance reporter for The New York Times has said she was removed from President Donald Trump’s Michigan campaign rally on Thursday.
Kathy Gray a correspondent for the Times and former political reporter for the Detroit Free Press said in tweets Thursday evening that she believes Trump campaign staffers located her using images she posted on her Twitter account and then escorted her out.
The reason for her expulsion was not immediately clear.
Just before 7 p.m., Gray had posted a photo to Twitter noting a “crammed crowd” and “not many masks” during the rainy day rally in Freeland, Michigan.
Crammed in crowd in the rain for trump rally in michigan. Not many masks pic.twitter.com/5DZ6JBVNK8
— Kathy Gray (@michpoligal) September 10, 2020
A few minutes later, Gray posted a photo of Air Force One accompanied with the caption “And so it begins.”
Less than 15 minutes later, Gray said she had been removed from the event.
“I’ve just been kicked out of the trump rally,” Gray tweeted, later adding that Thursday’s rally was the first time she had been escorted out of a Trump campaign event after campaign staff “tracked me down” from photos she had tweeted minutes before.
“We’re disappointed that the Trump campaign refused to credential our freelancer and then, when she registered and attended as a member of the public, they ejected her from the event,” Danielle Rhoades Ha vice president of communications for the Times said in a statement obtained by The Daily Beast. “Our goal is to cover these campaign events and talk to voters about the candidates, and that’s what Kathy was trying to do.”
On Thursday, Republican host on ABC’s “The View” Meghan McCain disparaged the press saying, journalists were “the enemy” to Republicans who are “here to make you look bad.”
Pesident Trump has repeatedly made efforts to discredit the Times calling its reporting “fake” and describing the press broadly as “the enemy of the people.”
Shoot that messenger. Bang! Bang!
What’s the confusion? It’s a Trump rally. No truth tellers allowed.
A Trump rally? She’s lucky that’s all that happened to her.
They were concerned for her safety. High risk of catching covid-19.
WTF is wrong with Meghan McCain? She cries every time Trump disparages her dead father then turns around and parrots the same vile, undemocratic attacks on everyone who is not her father, validating the rot that consumes her party.
<This is, of course, a rhetorical question.>