Just one week before, Justice Department lawyers representing Trump and White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham appeared in a Washington, DC courtroom to defend Grisham’s decision to suspend a reporter’s White House press credentials.
That reporter,
Playboy’s Brian Karem, had been pulled into a verbal altercation with former Trump advisor (and recent
fish oil pitchman) Sebastian Gorka, after the latter took issue with a joke Karem had made following an event in the Kennedy Rose Garden (disclaimer: this reporter witnessed the event in question and submitted a sworn declaration in the case).
In a letter explaining her decision, Stephanie Grisham, who
has a history of trying to exclude reporters who vex her employers, alleged that a statement by a Secret Service agent who’d been present indicated that the agent had found Karem’s behavior so disruptive that he’d been forced to intervene.
During last week’s court bearing, Justice Department lawyers alluded to the agent’s statement to support Grisham’s contention that Karem’s conduct warranted suspension of his credentials. But after a judge ordered the White House to provide him with a copy for his review,
they had to “respectfully inform” him that no such statement existed.
Fabricating evidence (or implying that evidence exists when it doesn’t) won’t fly in a federal District Court. Only actual evidence matters, and Karem’s attorneys had that in spades. After reviewing that evidence in the form of multiple videotapes, the judge issued an opinion ordering that Grisham restore Karem’s press pass, writing that he “[did] not find the evidence to support the conclusion that a reasonable person would have believed Karem to be genuinely threatening a physical altercation.”
