A former White House aide to President Donald Trump testified that the then-president did not realize his daily schedule was publicly available until near the end of his term.
When Trump finally realized that his presidential comings and goings were being released to the public in December 2021, he ordered details of his activities to be only available in condensed form, which occurred beginning that January, newly released House Jan. 6 committee transcripts show.
The admission was made by former White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere while testifying to the panel.
“Every evening we prepared and released the daily guidance for the following day of the president’s public schedule. Beginning sometime around mid- to late December, the president discovered that, for the first time, my understanding, that we released a public schedule of his to the public,” Deere told the panel.
“He wanted to change the way we did that.”
From that time onwards, Trump ordered only a summarized version of his schedule to be released.
The administration’s daily schedule included notations of Trump’s daily activists at the White House until that point when it was replaced with “boilerplate” indications that Trump would be busy with “many calls and have many meetings,” according to the New York Post.
“And so what became the new version of the public schedule was basically a couple of sentences about what his day would consist of, rather than specific times and titles of events and an outline form,” Deere said.