Longtime Clinton aide rips media for ‘hypocrisy’

A longtime Hillary Clinton aide is blasting the Washington media for “hypocrisy” after emails surfaced showing him apparently telling a journalist how to report on one of her speeches.

The controversy involves emails from 2009 exhumed in a FOIA request by Gawker.

In the emails, Philippe Reines, at the time a senior adviser to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, agreed to give a journalist an advance copy of a foreign policy speech.

{mosads}But Reines asked then-Atlantic contributing editor Marc Ambinder to agree to a number of conditions including describing the speech’s tone as “muscular” in his write-up.

Ambider agreed to the conditions and included the description “muscular” in his write-up of Clinton’s speech. Ambinder has since said he did not print anything he didn’t believe to be true.

Pundits blasted the exchange as “transactional journalism.”

But in an email to the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple on Friday, Reines criticized the “media violence” trigged by the emails as morally questionable, and argued that everyone in the press corps has done the same thing at one point.

“Any reporter who’s ever interacted with me can guess that I am more than a little entertained by seeing the media eat its own,” he said in the email. “But they also know that there is a lot of hypocrisy going on here.”

“And that’s because you can’t throw a dart at the White House Correspondents Dinner without hitting someone who has been involved in quote approval, ground rule negotiation, source obfuscation — and every other routine thing that goes on every day, on both sides of the aisle, on both sides of the equation,” he added.

“And right or wrong, this is the norm. It’s the norm in every newsroom – including your own – and every communications shop in the city.” 

Reines also pointed to an email exchange with Wemple in 2012 that he said could be perceived as ethically dubious “through the rearview prism of accusation.”

But, he added, “You were doing no such thing. You would never allow your name on a byline if you didn’t believe in every word. Nor would Marc Ambinder.

Prior to joining the State Department as Clinton’s adviser, Reines was her longtime press secretary and known for his confrontational relationship with journalists.