Mike Pence talks about lifting Trump campaign reporter bans
GOP vice presidential nominee, Mike Pence, has at least one area of disagreement with the top of the ticket that emerged in a radio interview this week on "The Hugh Hewitt Show" -- the practice of banning some reporters from access to campaign events. Asked by Hewitt about this, Pence talked about a campaign rally with Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin.
"There was a reporter that was not permitted in the setting," Pence said. "And I'll tell you, we're all talking about that. I had a long, I have a long history, as you well know, Hugh, of advocating and defending for a free and independent press."
Over the course of the presidential campaign, the Trump campaign has refused to issue credentials to reporters at several news organizations when it has disagreed with their coverage, including the Washington Post, Politico, Buzzfeed, and the Daily Beast, among others.
Pence did not say that the reporter was ever let into the rally, but he did say that access would be opened up over the next few monts. "We're going to have those conversations internally, and I fully expect in the next 100 days, we're going to continue to be available to the media, whether they're fair or unfair, and we're going to take our case to the American people directly," he told Hewitt.
In the interview, the GOP vice presidential nominee also took issue with the president for "name calling," referring to Trump as a demagogue in his speech at the Democratic convention.
"I don't think name calling has any place in public life," Pence said, "and I thought that was unfortunate that the president of the United States would use a term like that, let alone laced into a sentence like that."
Hewitt did not ask him whether that applied to the GOP nominee, as well, and Pence did not bring it up.
The Supreme Court, Hewitt said, "is everything" and he asked Pence about whether Trump would name justices like Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito to the court.
Pence said he was confident that Trump would appoint justices "in the tradition of the late and great" Scalia, and he said he would have a role in choosing the appointees.
"[H]e made a point at a town hall meeting to say that I would be involved in that publicly," Pence said. "[W]e have talked extensively about that."