HuffPost Reporter Shuts Down Karoline Leavitt’s Childish Name-Calling On CNN

HuffPost senior White House correspondent S.V. Dáte on Tuesday defended his coverage of President Donald Trump, specifically his line of questioning to the White House that went viral this week over press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s childish response.

“The views I have about Donald Trump now are those that have come from my reporting and from my watching him and from my experience. And If I don’t convey my conclusions about Donald Trump to my audience, then I’m failing them,” Dáte said on CNN News Central.

“I mean, people who are watching CNN or reading HuffPost or The New York Times for that matter, they shouldn’t be expected to just get stenography and then go back and do all the historical research on what this man has said and done in the past before.”

Watch the interview here:

Last week, Dáte reached out to the White House for comment regarding the decision to choose Budapest as the meeting place for Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The reporter’s text exchange with Leavitt went viral after she responded to Dáte’s query about who chose the location with what appears to be the administration’s idea of professionalism: “Your mom did.”

On Monday, Leavitt posted a screenshot of the exchange on X that included her responses, calling Dáte a “left-wing hack.” Neither the exchange nor her post on X answered his original question.

“All I can do is my reporting, and part of that is asking them for their view of it, for their explanation of it, for some sort of background as to why this happened, et cetera,” Dáte told the network. “Did it help her base? Probably, I mean as you saw on Twitter she got a bunch of retweets and people were calling me names. … And that happens now, I mean, that’s the world we live in.”

That Trump-Putin meeting is now suspended after a call between U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, according to multiple reports.

The White House did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s comment request for this story, nor the additional opportunity in the request to answer Dáte’s original question.