State Department Press Room Goes Dark — At Least for Now

For the first six weeks of the Trump Administration, the State Department didn’t hold a single on-camera press briefing — long a fixture of US diplomatic communications — finally beginning them on March 7. Less than three weeks later, they’ve stopped again.

Officials said the on-camera briefings won’t resume for at least two weeks as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson moves to get a permanent spokesperson in place. Mark Toner, a career foreign service officer who has been the department’s acting spokesman, is slated for another assignment. He might return to the podium on camera in April, but the Trump administration doesn’t yet have a full-time spokesperson in place. That official is expected to be Heather Nauert, until now a Fox News anchor, but she is awaiting approval of her security clearance. She hasn’t been officially named and hasn’t yet started at the State Department. In the interim, the State Department will hold background briefings, in which unnamed officials will brief intermittently on specific topics. Under the Obama Administration and those before it, the State Department took questions on-camera on a nearly daily basis. The briefings are closely watched by foreign officials as well as US diplomats around the world for public guidance on US policy.