White House official terrorizes network green rooms

White House official Boris Epshteyn, a combative Trump loyalist tasked with plugging the president’s message on television, threatened earlier in 2017 to pull all West Wing officials from appearing on Fox News after a tense appearance on anchor Bill Hemmer’s show. Epshteyn, apparently, got in a yelling match with a Fox News booker after Hemmer pressed him for details of President Donald Trump’s controversial executive order cracking down on immigration from Muslim-majority countries — a topic he was not expecting to be grilled on. “Am I someone you want to make angry?” Epshteyn told the booker, the sources said. When he threatened to pull White House officials from the network, the fed-up booker had had enough. “Go right ahead,” the booker fired back, the sources said, aware that Epshteyn had no power to follow through on a threat that would have upended the administration’s relationship with a sympathetic news network. Ultimately, White House officials have continued to appear on Fox News, and the network said that it handled the flare-up professionally.