The White House's daily communications staff meeting has not taken place for several days in the wake of someone leaking staffer Kelly Sadler's joke that Sen. John McCain's opinion of Gina Haspel, confirmed Thursday as CIA director, doesn't matter because "he's dying anyway."
A senior White House official said the daily communications staff meeting, which brought together more than two dozen press and communications staffers each morning, had not been held for several days.
The New York Times first reported the news.
The senior White House official said the large daily meeting had been suspended indefinitely and was not likely to return to the schedule. Instead, various groups of communications or press aides have met separately in smaller numbers this week, part of a larger effort to streamline what has been a chaotic press shop in recent weeks.
Discussions about ending the sometimes unwieldy morning meeting had occurred before the Sadler leak, the senior official said, but senior staffers decided to pull the trigger on a number of internal changes in the wake of the McCain controversy.
