Who says crowd size doesn’t matter? Certainly not the White House in the first days of the administration, as newly released Interior Department emails show.
They reveal the extent to which the National Park Service offered assistance to the White House, which was pushing a debunked claim that President Donald Trump had the largest inaugural crowd size ever.
The morning after Inauguration Day, National Park Service communications chief Mike Litterst emailed White House press secretary Sean Spicer offering “any corrective messaging” about the inauguration attendance size, on behalf of acting National Park Service Director Mike Reynolds.
The email is one of several released via a FOIA request from E&E News.
The previous day the National Park Service had retweeted (and later deleted) images that unfavorably compared President Obama’s 2009 inauguration crowd to Trump’s.
Spicer responded to Litterst’s offer, writing, “the aerial photos (Reynolds) mentioned would be great.”
The National Park Service then sent the White House close-up photographs of the National Mall which cut out the sparsely attended areas near the Washington Monument, making the Trump crowd sizes appear more impressive than the wider shots broadcast by television networks.
Instead, these photos only focused on the first few blocks of the Mall right in front of the Capitol. They were also very different from official National Park Service photos released earlier this month — in response to another FOIA request — that compared the crowd sizes of the last three inaugurations.
The original NPS retweet comparing the two inauguration crowds caused the White House to quickly order all Interior Department twitter accounts to cease operations.
The new emails also shed light on how that message was disseminated to the National Park Service.
“All bureaus and the department have been directed by incoming administration to shut down Twitter platforms immediately until further notice,” DOI public affairs officer Frank Quimby wrote to department officials at 4:56 p.m. on Inauguration Day.
On Saturday afternoon, Litterst forwarded Quimby’s guidance note to Spicer saying, “FYI, yesterday’s message…”
Later that day — in one of his first official acts as president — Trump complained about the media’s coverage of his crowd size at a visit to the CIA headquarters. Spicer pressed the messaging further himself in a fiery press statement where he notoriously claimed: “That was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period.”
