RUSH: Now, something else happened. This is amazing. The Washington Post reported that the secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has a directive that nobody in the office is allowed to look him in the eye. Nobody is allowed to make eye contact with him. It’s that Tillerson doesn’t spend much time working, that he goes to his office and closets himself in there and does nothing but read. (Probably reports on oil drilling or some such.) But he goes in there, he shelters himself. He doesn’t want to deal with the people in the State Department.
You’re not allowed to make eye contact. You’re not allowed to look at him. You’re not allowed to interrupt him. You’re not allowed to do anything. He goes in there for hours on end and just retreats from the world and from the job, and an AP reporter has come out and said that that is BS. The AP reporter is… Matt Lee is his name. He’s the beat reporter at the State Department for the last 18 years. He went on Twitter to dispute this story in the Washington Post and to lament that bad reporting is making it more difficult to get any reporting on real issues at the State Department because of this. His tweet read:
“This Washington Post story is not true, and people repeating it are making it more difficult to address very real issues.” What he means is the Washington Post lies about Rex Tillerson, makes things up about him that he’s insulated like a monarch — and you’re not allowed to look at him and you’re not allowed to touch him and you’re not allowed to be in the same room with Tillerson — and the people who see that in the State Department say, “Screw that! We’re not talking to them. They’re gonna make it up anyway, so we’re not talking to them.” So reporters end up being denied access. I haven’t seen this in a while. The AP and the Washington Post are all in the Drive-Bys, and this AP guy — this AP veteran — went right after the Washington Post and told ’em and told everybody they’re making it up.
Proving — proving — that in many cases, what journalism is about is access,