Kellyanne Conway managed to serve in the White House and avoid a crate of well-deserved criticism in the media because Kellyanne had unique access to the White Houses’ most inner secrets and was willing to leak. The media relied upon Kellyanne to get that information because they knew that Kellyanne would eventually get them the real story, but only off camera and only anonymously. The dynamic allowed Kellyanne to skate on behavior that damned well should have been called out and highlighted.

According to a new report in the Washington Post, the media enabled a lot of Kellyanne’s worst excesses, often information critical to the nation, because the access she provided propelled media figure careers. Kellyanne was a veritable floodgate in a White House that demanded secrecy and used it to keep her reputation as polished as possible. Kellyanne purportedly sold out everyone and anyone for her own purposes, which sounds like the Kellyanne we’ve witnessed for years:

Former White House aide Cliff Sims wrote in “Team of Vipers” that he once sat down in the West Wing at the personal laptop of President Trump’s senior adviser, at her direction, to compose a press statement. But because Conway’s text messages were tied to both her phone and her personal computer, Sims kept getting distracted by “a nonstop stream of iMessages popping up on the screen,”

Kellyanne’s willingness to rip apart the people she defended in front of the cameras is near jaw-dropping:

“Over the course of 20 minutes or so, she was having simultaneous conversations with no fewer than a half-dozen reporters, most of them from outlets the White House frequently trashed for publishing ‘fake news’ . . . As I sat there trying to type, she bashed Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, and Sean Spicer,” and talked about Trump “like a child she had to set straight.”

According to the report, Kellyanne could be counted upon to leak off-camera and lie on camera and got away with almost all of it. The picture one gets is of a person solely out for herself, ready to lay blame on specific White House figures with fatal venom. Whenever one encounters such a person and doesn’t hear from the subject of the accusation, one needs to be very careful because there is an inherent tendency for the leaker to sanitize his or her own role and exaggerate the problems with the subject of the leak. This would be especially the case when Kellyanne so readily ripped people like Kushner, Spicer, Bannon, and Trump.

Leaking and lying. Lying and leaking. It’s been the Kellyanne way, and the news media has largely gone along for the ride: Giving her airtime on news shows, failing to forcefully call her out for her continued violations of the Hatch Act, and offering kid-glove treatment in exchange for her inside information.

Though every White House leaks, veteran reporters say that Kellyanne broke new ground in her willingness to lie and toss others overboard. She often told the truth about others’ mistakes and lied about her role. Once on camera, she lied as a matter of course and said the opposite of what she had just said when the cameras were off.

“She has been an innovator in shamelessness, a true entrepreneurial spirit, and that is saying something in this group,” as Jack Holmes, Esquire’s politics editor, put it.

It is just as shameful that only when she announced her departure did we hear about the inner-workings and Kellyanne Conway’s role in it. It is noteworthy that some in the media picked up on Kellyanne’s M.O. early and wouldn’t play her game. Mika Brezinski banned Kellyanne from Morning Joe very early because “all she does is lie.”

Kellyanne will not be missed on TV but we do wish her the best in patching things up with her wonderful daughter Claudia.

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Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @MiciakZoom