Multiple outlets have reported, citing unnamed sources, that when Trump left Turkey after the NATO Summit last month, he secretly departed the country on an alternate plane because of an assassination threat made against him from Iran.
The clandestine operation meant that, for several hours, the President’s real whereabouts were unknown to—and concealed from—both the White House press pool and the American public.
In response to the Post’s questions about the operation, White House communications director Steven Cheung shared a statement defending the plane Trump traveled on to get to Turkey, a Qatar-gifted aircraft that drew controversy.
Historically, the journalists who make up the White House press pool travel with—or alongside—the sitting President nearly everywhere he goes. Here’s what to know about the pool, and previous instances when a commander-in-chief has made the extraordinary move of traveling without those journalists.
“For nearly a century, the story of the American presidency has been written through the eyes of the ‘press pool,’ the small team of writers, photographers and technicians assigned each day to cover the commander-in-chief on behalf of the broader corps of correspondents,” the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), which works to coordinate and ensure access for journalists covering the White House, said on its website. The WHCA went on to say that the accounts documented by the pool “provide a daily record of the presidency that forever lives in the archives of news organizations.”
Members of the White House press pool have been with Presidents during a slew of historic and high-stakes moments. They were, for instance, in the motorcade when former President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. The press pool was also present when an assassination attempt was made on former President Ronald Reagan’s life in Washington, D.C. in 1981. On Sept. 11, 2001, amid the chaos and fear that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush traveled with a smaller press pool to a military facility and then back to the nation’s capital. Journalists have also followed Presidents—including Trump—into dangerous war zones.
When Presidents have traveled without the press pool in the past
In 2010, former President Barack Obama left the White House without the press pool and went to one of his daughter’s soccer games, a decision that generated controversy. The Associated Press wrote at the time that Obama had “quietly breached years of protocol” by doing so.
“As the new leader of the free world, we expect that you will preserve longstanding traditions that ensure coverage of the Trump presidency,” the organizations said in their 2016 letter. “The idea of a press pool that covers all of the president’s movements is one that dates back to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. Every president of both parties has treated this important tradition with respect. The role of the press pool is critically important to our country, whose citizens depend on and deserve to know what the president is doing.”
Air Force One has been used as a “decoy” for a President’s protection in the past: former President Bill Clinton, for instance, traveled to Pakistan in a white aircraft that followed Air Force One in 2000. But he got off the unmarked plane in Islamabad in view of cameras and journalists, revealing the covert operation. And, before takeoff, Clinton Administration officials told at least one member of the White House pool about the operation.
CNN anchor Jake Tapper emphasized on Tuesday the extraordinary circumstances of the clandestine operation in Turkey.
Ronald L. Rowe Jr., a former acting director of the Secret Service, told the Post that, if the President’s location is kept secret, it is for a reason.
Robert McDonald, who worked with the Secret Service for more than two decades, told TIME that the operation in Turkey appears to be a result of real-time improvisation by the President’s security team. He also cast doubt on the idea that the journalists who were on the former Air Force One were left at risk.
McDonald went on to say that restricting the number of people who are informed of such an operation is standard practice, and stressed that the outcome of the mission was that everyone arrived home safe.
“Everybody that I’m aware of got home from that trip to Turkey,” he said. “The bottom line is everybody got home safe. That’s the main function of the Secret Service.”
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