A18 N + THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALMONDAY, AUGUST 3, 2020
WASHINGTON — For the first
half of his term, President Trump
treated the White House press
briefing as must-see television.
From his small dining room off
the Oval Office, he
kept close watch over
his first two press
secretaries as they
battled with journal-
ists, defended his
performance and often tried to
rewrite history.
Kayleigh McEnany, the fourth
person to hold the job since Mr.
Trump took office, does all of
those things. The difference now
is that the president, who once
considered the White House
briefings to be appointment
television, does not always
watch.
Just over 13 weeks from Elec-
tion Day, Mr. Trump is back to
serving as his own primary
spokesman, putting his faith in
himself to pull out of a deep
polling hole and make the case
for why voters should choose to
give him four more years despite
his mishandling of the coro-
navirus pandemic and a brutal
recession.
Whether he is helping himself
is subject to debate. But his
decision to put himself front and
center on a near-daily basis has
left Ms. McEnany in a distinctly
secondary role. Not only has her
audience of one failed to watch a
number of her briefings in recent
weeks — a senior administration
official suggested on Friday that
the president was busy with
other matters — she has also
encountered flagging interest
from television networks; only
Fox News regularly carries her
briefings live, and at least one
network has declined a request
to have her appear on one of its
shows.
All of that is leaving it increas-
ingly unclear what purpose Ms.
McEnany is filling beyond berat-
ing the news media from the
briefing room podium.
When Ms. McEnany, 32, as-
sumed the role in April, Mr.
Trump was delivering two-hour
briefings on the coronavirus
pandemic. At the time, questions
were raised internally about
whether Ms. McEnany should
start formalized briefings or
continue defending the president
through television appearances
— she initially made a name for
herself in his world by defending
him on CNN, a network where he
has few allies.
In April, her new colleagues
also wondered how Ms. McE-
nany, an operative known for
overtly partisan and often fact-
free defenses of the president,
would fare in the White House,
which is supposed to separate
official business from campaign
operations — at least in theory.
If that was ever a concern for
Ms. McEnany or anyone else on
staff, it never showed. Working
with Mark Meadows, the White
House chief of staff, and several
of the officials he brought with
him when he joined the adminis-
tration in March, Ms. McEnany
reinstated the briefings, which
had been stopped under her
predecessor, Stephanie Grisham.
Ms. McEnany infused them with
campaign-style talking points
and edited videos of news clips,
some of which were stripped of
context.
Instead of bringing the public
health experts involved in the
coronavirus response with her to
the podium so that reporters
could ask them questions, she
spoke to them herself before-
hand.
Early in Ms. McEnany’s ten-
ure, she was praised by conser-
vative news media for her at-
tacks on the mainstream press.
But since then, she has so far
struggled to make the briefings
compelling enough — or credible
enough — to refocus the atten-
tion on what the administration
hopes to highlight instead of the
pandemic. She recently resorted
to playing a video of protesters in
Portland, Ore., that she accused
the news media of ignoring. Thevideo contained explicit lan-
guage, causing Fox News, which
faithfully airs the briefings, to cut
away.
“We were not expecting that
video, and our management here
at Fox News has decided we will
cut away at this time,” the host,
Harris Faulkner, said.
Ms. McEnany is hardly the
first Trump press secretary to
criticize the news media, or to
say things from the podium that
are untrue.
Sean Spicer, the first to hold
the job under Mr. Trump, started
out by trying to persuade incred-
ulous reporters and the nation
that the Inauguration Day crowd
size set an attendance record. (It
didn’t.) Sarah Huckabee Sanders
refused to disavow Mr. Trump’s
claim that journalists were the
enemies of the people. And Ms.
Grisham, who never held a brief-
ing, preferred using Twitter to
call out journalists by name.
But for all that, Ms. McEnany’s
predecessors also understood the
value in working with reporters,
even when it was not something
Mr. Trump encouraged.
Jonathan Karl of ABC News,
the former president of the White
House Correspondents’ Associa-
tion, criticized Ms. McEnany’stendency to fill the press brief-
ings with “head-spinning contra-
dictions” and her lack of interest
in clarifying Mr. Trump’s deci-
sions, particularly on matters of
race.
“The White House press secre-
tary serves at the pleasure of a
president but is also a public
servant whose salary is paid by
taxpayers,” Mr. Karl wrote in a
Washington Post op-ed in July.
“Denying reality and using the
White House podium for purely
political purposes is a violation of
public trust.”
Ms. McEnany has taken the
adversarial posture to a new
level. At one point, she insinu-
ated that reporters were adverse
to religion by saying journalists
were “desperately” opposed to
houses of worship reopening
during the pandemic.
Ari Fleischer, who served as
press secretary during the ad-
ministration of President George
W. Bush, praised Ms. McEnany’s
performance but said she had
demonstrated little interest in
forging a relationship with the
press. He said her tendency of
“hitting the press with a two-by-
four” risked overshadowing any
substantive contributions.
“The press secretaries havealways served two masters, as
the old adage goes,” Mr. Fleisch-
er, a Fox News contributor, said.
“But these days, the president is
way bigger than the press in
reality of how the briefing
works.”
Mike McCurry, who served as
press secretary under President
Bill Clinton, said that Ms. McE-
nany only seemed to be inter-
ested in serving as a partisan
booster for the president.
“There’s got to be a balance
between providing information
and content that is useful to the
public while advancing whatever
the president’s political objec-
tives are,” Mr. McCurry said.
“You kind of have to keep both of
those goals in mind.”
The White House disputed the
idea that Ms. McEnany did not
work with reporters, but officials
said she spent most of her time
with the president, maintaining
that is what she should be doing
as his chief spokeswoman. Offi-
cials said that no cable television
networks had declined to have
Ms. McEnany appear, but that
she almost exclusively appeared
on Fox News.
“Kayleigh is a skilled, savvy
communicator who delivers
policy positions while vocally
defending President Trump
against biased, negative media
coverage — which she is not
afraid to expose when journalists
attempt to distort the record,”
Judd Deere, a White House
spokesman, said in a statement
about his boss.
Questioning news coverage
has become a central part of her
regular briefings. Ms. McEnany
and members of the White House
communications staff spend
much of the mornings on the
days she briefs in preparation for
her to take the podium, assem-
bling talking points and counter-
attacks that are then stuffed into
an oversized binder. The final
product is assembled for her by
Julia Hahn, a former Breitbart
News employee who now works
on the White House press and
communications staff.A recent photograph of the
innards of the binder — full of
tabs containing ready-made
talking points on topics such as
“HATE,” “LIES,” “MASKS” and
“WINS” — offered a lens not into
the problems the administration
faces, but how Mr. Trump and his
aides would prefer to recast
them.
On Friday, Ms. McEnany’s
fingers trailed through the bind-
er tabs as she received a ques-
tion on elections in Hong Kong.
“I do have an answer for you,”
she said, before reading from a
prepared statement that con-
demned officials there for post-
poning an election.
In the same briefing, she de-
fended Mr. Trump’s suggestion
that the November election be
postponed, in part because he
had directed her to focus part of
her briefing on the topic, a senior
administration official said.
At other times, Ms. McEnany
and Mr. Trump have not been in
sync. Last week, the president
appeared confused at one of his
own briefings when he was told
that Ms. McEnany had shared
with reporters on live television
that he was being tested for the
coronavirus several times a day.
“I don’t know about more than
one,” Mr. Trump said. “I do prob-
ably on average a test every two
days, three days, and I don’t
know of any time I’ve taken two
in one day, but I could see that
happening.”
That moment starkly illustrat-
ed the limitation of press brief-
ings under Mr. Trump, a presi-
dent who has no interest in let-
ting them serve in a traditional
capacity as an organizing device
to make sure his most senior
officials are in step with him.
“That has always been the
value of a press briefing,” Mr.
McCurry said. “It is really a way
to get a handle on the informa-
tion and content that the public
needs to know, and that the
government has an obligation to
disclose. I’m not sure that atti-
tude prevails in this White
House.”Press Secretary, Shunted to the Side, Uses Her Podium to Heckle the Press
By KATIE ROGERS
and MAGGIE HABERMANKayleigh McEnany, the fourth press secretary under President
Trump, has faced declining interest from television networks.DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMESWHITE
HOUSE
MEMO“mastermind” of a prominent
hack last month, accusing him of
tricking his way into Twitter’s sys-
tems and taking over the accounts
of some of the world’s most fa-
mous people, including Barack
Obama, Kanye West and Jeff Be-
zos.
His arrest raised questions
about how someone so young
could penetrate the defenses of
what was supposedly one of Sili-
con Valley’s most sophisticated
technology companies. Mr. Clark,
who prosecutors said worked with
at least two others to hack Twitter
but was the leader, is being
charged as an adult with 30 fel-
onies.
Millions of teenagers play the
same video games and interact in
the same online forums as Mr.
Clark. But what emerges in inter-
views with more than a dozen peo-
ple who know him, along with le-
gal documents, online forensic
work and social media archives, is
a picture of a youth who had a
strained relationship with his fam-
ily and who spent much of his life
online becoming skilled at con-
vincing people to give him money,
photos and information.
“He scammed me for a little bit
of money when I was just a kid,”
said Colby Meeds, 19, a Minecraft
player who said Mr. Clark stole
$50 from him in 2016 by offering to
sell him a digital cape for a
Minecraft character but not deliv-
ering it.
Reached via a brief video call on
Sunday from the Hillsborough
County Jail in Tampa, Mr. Clark
appeared in a black sleeveless
shirt, his hair tumbling into his
eyes. “What are your questions?”
he asked, before pushing back his
chair and hanging up. He is sched-
uled for a virtual court appear-
ance on Tuesday.
Mr. Clark and his sister grew up
in Tampa with their mother,
Emiliya Clark, a Russian immi-
grant who holds certifications to
work as a facialist and as a real es-
tate broker. Reached at her home,
his mother declined to comment.
His father lives in Indiana, accord-
ing to public documents; he did
not return a request for comment.
His parents divorced when he was
7.
Mr. Clark doted on his dog and
didn’t like school or have many
friends, said James Xio, who met
Mr. Clark online several years
ago. He had a habit of moving be-
tween emotional extremes, flying
off the handle over small trans-
gressions, Mr. Xio said.
“He’d get mad mad,” said Mr.
Xio, 18. “He had a thin patience.”
Abishek Patel, 19, who played
Minecraft with Mr. Clark, de-
fended him. “He has a good heart
and always looks out for the peo-
ple who he cares about,” he said.
In 2016, Mr. Clark set up a
YouTube channel, according to the
social media monitoring firm So-
cialBlade. He built an audience of
thousands of fans and became
known for playing a violent ver-
sion of Minecraft called Hardcore
Factions, under user names like
“Open” and “OpenHCF.”
But he became even better
known for taking money from
other Minecraft players. People
can pay for upgrades with the
game, like accessories for their
characters.
One tactic used by Mr. Clark
was appearing to sell desirable
user names for Minecraft and
then not actually providing the
buyer with that user name. He
also offered to sell the capes for
Minecraft characters, but some-
times vanished after other play-
ers sent him money.
Mr. Clark once offered to sell his
own Minecraft user name,
“Open,” said Nick Jerome, 21, a
student at Christopher Newport
University in Virginia. The two
messaged over Skype and Mr. Je-
rome, who was then 17, said he
sent about $100 for the user name
because he thought it was cool.
Then Mr. Clark blocked him.
“I was just kind of a dumb teen-
ager, and looking back, there’s no
way I should have ever done this,”
Mr. Jerome said. “Why should I
ever have trusted this dude?”
In late 2016 and early 2017, other
Minecraft players produced vid-
eos on YouTube describing how
they had lost money or faced on-
line attacks after brushes with Mr.
Clark’s alias “Open.” In some of
those videos, Mr. Clark, who can
be heard using racist and sexist
epithets, also talked about being
home schooled while making
$5,000 a month from his Minecraft
activities.
Mr. Clark’s real identity rarely
showed up online. At one point, he
revealed his face and gaming set-
up online, and some players called
him Graham. His name was also
mentioned in a 2017 Twitter post.
Mr. Clark’s interests soon ex-
panded to the video game Fortnite
and the lucrative world of cryp-
tocurrencies. He joined an online
forum for hackers, known as
OGUsers, and used the screen
name Graham$. His OGUsers ac-
count was registered from the
same internet protocol address in
Tampa that had been attached to
his Minecraft accounts, according
to research done for The Times by
the online forensics firm Echosec.
Mr. Clark described himself on
OGUsers as a “full time crypto
trader dropout” and said he was
“focused on just making money all
around for everyone.” Graham$
was later banned from the com-
munity, according to posts uncov-
ered by Echosec, after the mod-
erators said he failed to pay Bit-
coin to another user who had al-
ready sent him money to complete
a transaction.
Still, Mr. Clark had already har-nessed OGUsers to find his way
into a hacker community known
for taking over people’s phone
numbers to access all of the online
accounts attached to the numbers,
an attack known as SIM swap-
ping. The main goal was to drain
victims’ cryptocurrency ac-
counts.
In 2019, hackers remotely
seized control of the phone of
Gregg Bennett, a tech investor in
the Seattle area. Within a few min-
utes, they had secured Mr. Ben-
nett’s online accounts, including
his Amazon and email accounts,
as well as 164 Bitcoins that were
worth $856,000 at the time and
would be worth $1.8 million today.
Mr. Bennett soon received an
extortion note, which he shared
with The Times. It was signed by
Scrim, another of Mr. Clark’s on-
line aliases, according to several
of his online friends.
“We just want the remainder of
the funds in the Bittrex,” Scrim
wrote, referring to the Bitcoin ex-
change from which the coins had
been taken. “We are always one
step ahead and this is your easiest
option.”
In April, the Secret Serviceseized 100 Bitcoins from Mr.
Clark, according to government
forfeiture documents. A few
weeks later, Mr. Bennett received
a letter from the Secret Service
saying they had recovered 100 of
his Bitcoins, citing the same code
that was assigned to the coins
seized from Mr. Clark.
It is unclear whether other peo-
ple were involved in the incident
or what happened to the remain-
ing 64 Bitcoins.
Mr. Bennett said in an interview
that a Secret Service agent told
him that the person with the stol-
en Bitcoins was not arrested be-
cause he was a minor. The Secret
Service did not respond to a re-
quest for comment.
By then, Mr. Clark was living in
his own apartment in a Tampa
condo complex. He had an expen-
sive gaming setup, a balcony and
a view of a grassy park, according
to friends and social media posts.
Two neighbors said that Mr.
Clark kept to himself, coming and
going at unusual hours and driv-
ing a white BMW 3 Series.
On an Instagram account that
has since been taken down, @er-ror, Mr. Clark also shared videos of
himself swaying to rap music in
designer sneakers. He was given
a shout-out on Instagram by a jew-
eler to the hip-hop elite, with a pic-
ture showing that Mr. Clark, as
@error, had purchased a gem-en-
crusted Rolex.
Mr. Xio, who became close
friends with Mr. Clark, said the
April run-in with the Secret Serv-
ice shook Mr. Clark.
“He knew he was given a sec-
ond chance,” Mr. Xio said. “And he
wanted to work on being as legit
as possible.”
But less than two weeks after
the Secret Service seizure, pros-
ecutors said Mr. Clark began
working to get inside Twitter. Ac-
cording to a government affidavit,
Mr. Clark convinced a “Twitter
employee that he was a co-worker
in the IT department and had the
employee provide credentials to
access the customer service por-
tal.”
For help, Mr. Clark found ac-
complices on OGUsers, according
to the charging documents. The
accomplices offered to broker the
sale of Twitter accounts that hadcool user names, like @w, while
Mr. Clark would enter Twitter’s
systems and change ownership of
the accounts, according to the fil-
ings and accounts from the ac-
complices.
The hack unfolded on July 15. A
few days later, one accomplice,
who went by the name “lol,” told
The Times that the person they
knew as the mastermind began
cheating the customers who
wanted to covertly buy the Twitter
accounts. The hacker took the
money and handed over the ac-
count, but then quickly reclaimed
it by using his access to Twitter’s
systems to boot out the client. It
was reminiscent of what Mr. Clark
had done earlier on Minecraft.
When Mr. Clark’s online ac-
quaintances learned he had been
charged with the hack, several
said they were not surprised.
“He never really seemed to care
about anyone but himself,” said
Connor Belcher, a gamer known
as @iMakeMcVidz who had previ-
ously teamed up on a separate
YouTube channel with Mr. Clark
before becoming one of his online
critics.Troubled Online Path
Of Teen ‘Mastermind’
From Page ASusan Jacobson contributed re-
porting from Tampa, Fla. Sheelagh
McNeil and Jack Begg contributed
research.
Graham Ivan Clark’s online misbehavior ended on Friday when police arrested him at his apart-
ment in Tampa, Fla. The broad Twitter hack asked for Bitcoin to be sent to them via dozens of high-
profile accounts, such as rapper Kanye West and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.OCTAVIO JONES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESHILLSBOROUGH COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE