White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) president Eugene Daniels, a staffer for the establishment media outlet Politico, unsuccessfully sought employment last year on former Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Daniels, for the record, denies these claims.
Multiple sources familiar with the matter told Breitbart News that Daniels, who is a Politico White House correspondent and is the “Chief Playbook Correspondent” for the media outlet’s highly influential daily newsletter, sat for at least two interviews with Harris’s presidential campaign last year. These sources say that it’s unclear exactly which position Daniels sought with the Harris campaign, but sources familiar with the matter told Breitbart News that after two interviews the Harris campaign went dark on him after Harris herself told senior campaign staff not to hire him.
Daniels, for the record, denies what these sources say. “Absolutely not true,” Daniels told Breitbart News via direct message on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, earlier this month when Breitbart News first inquired about it. “Never met with anyone about a job and never would.”
After first inquiring about this and Daniels denying it earlier in February, Breitbart News did not publish this story at the time but kept digging around and asking more sources for confirmation. Not a single person who spoke to Breitbart News would defend Daniels on record—including many White House correspondents for competing outlets—and political staffers on both sides of the aisle who spoke with Breitbart News also would not defend him on record. While the current White House has an often standoffish relationship with Daniels and the WHCA and most of the establishment media, a former White House official who worked in a previous administration told Breitbart News they found Daniels a delight to work with.
“Eugene Daniels was a joy to work with and whenever we needed a story written, he would always come through,” a former White House official told Breitbart News.
This whole story took on new life on Tuesday after the White House announced that the WHCA would no longer be making determinations about pool access for press pool coverage of the president. The WHCA has regularly used access to the pool to control which outlets get access to the president and which outlets do not, and has denied many outlets, including Breitbart News, the opportunity to cover the news and ask questions of the president. So when the White House made the announcement, the WHCA’s flippant reaction—a statement from Daniels bashing this move, presenting the WHCA as some kind of journalistic free press institution—was shockingly hypocritical.
Daniels said the White House’s move “tears at the independence of a free press,” all while not defending the WHCA’s long history of denying legitimate news outlets access to the White House and president, including during his tenure as WHCA president.
Then shortly after this statement, news broke that Daniels was ditching Politico for a weekend show on the overtly partisan MSNBC cable channel. It is highly unusual for the head of the WHCA to be at an outlet as partisan as MSNBC.
In response to that news, the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr,. went on record to call Daniels “Kamala Harris’s Comms Director” in a post on social media.
Trump Jr. on record saying this further fueled the original story that Daniels had denied previously to Breitbart News, and Breitbart News approached him again on Tuesday evening to see if he stands by his original denial or if he had anything else to add. Daniels has not commented further on record on the matter. He also has not answered, when asked by Breitbart News, if he intends to fulfill the rest of his term as WHCA president or not, given his new show on the highly partisan network MSNBC and him abandoning his role at Politico. Any continuation as WHCA president for Daniels is likely to cause the rest of the establishment media and WHCA members serious concern, as the Trump White House is likely to keep escalating matters with the establishment media and WHCA from this point forward.
“Eugene is one of the few people who can get a new job on the same day he destroys the century-long and storied legacy of the White House Correspondents’ Association,” a former media executive who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal from Daniels told Breitbart News. “However, he clearly saw the writing on the wall at Politico and decided to cash in his Kamala-chit as a golden parachute from certain termination.”
Daniels took over as president of the WHCA on July 15, 2024, just a couple days after a gunman attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, which he wrote about in a lengthy letter to WHCA members the day he started in the position. “When WHCA members like Doug Mills, Evan Vucci, Anna Moneymaker, Jabin Botsford and others ran toward an attempted assassination of a former president and current presidential candidate to chronicle that moment for the American people and for history, they represented the best of us,” Daniels wrote.
In that letter, he wrote about how he supported more press access across the board—something the WHCA regularly claims but often is hypocritical on.
“Today, I took over as president of our association and am honored for the chance to serve alongside Weijia Jiang, Justin Sink, Sara Cook, Andrew Harnik, Jacqui Heinrich, Courtney Subramanian and Karen Travers,” Daniels wrote in that letter. “First, on behalf of all of the board and association: an enormous thank you to Kelly O’Donnell, our tireless outgoing president. She has left a legacy in both measurable and intangible ways and, through a political year and election cycle unlike any other, has continued to push for broader press access and public accountability. We are all, and I am particularly indebted to Kelly for her service, leadership and friendship. We just finished our first meeting of this new term. I wanted to share with you some remarks that sum up how I am feeling and viewing our work over the next year. We start this new term in a perilous time for our country and profession. The importance of what we do has never been more apparent or felt more urgent, nor has access to the reliable and timely information we provide been more necessary. In the midst of this moment, a reminder of the WHCA’s mission seems worthwhile: we share the belief, held by our country’s founders and enshrined in the First Amendment, that an independent news media is vital to the health of the republic. The White House Correspondents’ Association exists to promote excellence in journalism as well as journalism education, and to ensure robust news coverage of the president and the presidency.”
But it was not long after this that sources say Daniels was seeking new employment. Less than a week after Daniels sent this letter, then-President Joe Biden dropped out of his reelection campaign after his abysmal debate performance against Trump in late June. On July 21, 2024, Harris entered the race for the presidency and quickly became the presumptive Democrat nominee for president. Again, while Daniels denies it, multiple sources familiar with the matter say that Daniels sought unsuccessfully to work for Harris’s campaign.