Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, has been secretly negotiating for a job to host her own show on MSNBC. That’s according to an exclusive report in Axios citing anonymous sources on Friday.

My immediate thought on hearing the news is that this a major conflict of interest. Psaki could have waited until she was no longer the gatekeeper to Pres. Biden before trying to get a high-paying, high-profile gig at a media outlet. But of course the money and the leverage would not be as good after she left the White House.

It’s no surprise that Psaki would get a TV gig — she’s good on camera. I think she did a good job at making Biden look better than he is as a president.

But the report that she has been in talks with MSNBC executives for a while gives the appearance of at least a conflict of interest.

I’ve been a political appointee in federal government twice (FDA and the State Department) and both times gotten extensive and repeated lectures by the in-house counsels about the ethics laws. They lawyers told me when I started and then on election years.

Emily Posts

'Welcome to the S--t Show!'

“Welcome to the s--t show!” a man yelled at me from across the private dining room of the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). It was August 2020 and my second day on the job in the Trump administration. I was in charge of all the media for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) during the COVID pandemic. I was walking out of the lunch room so…

Read more

9 months ago · 4 likes · 10 comments · Emily Miller

The government lawyers are supposed to make sure political appointees aren’t helping a company profit from insider information while on the taxpayers’ payroll. The ethics laws about negotiating with potential employers are cratfted to prevent outside influence.

The laws allow you to negotiate a post-service job as long as you recuse yourself from any work related to their interests. For example, I could not have worked on vaccine issues at the FDA if I was negotiating with Pfizer.

So Psaki would be expected to recuse herself from talking to any NBC and MSNBC reporters and producers while she was negotiating for her new hosting job. I am guessing she did not do that because then the reporters would have complained about now having access to the White House

When Axios got this story exclusively and notable did not say it asked Psaki for comment, that tells me she or her reps gave the story for a reason. I’m sure…

Share