Bezos faces criticism after executives met with Trump on day of Post’s non-endorsement
Executives of Blue Origin briefly met with Trump within hours after paper spiked endorsement of Harris
Michael Sainato
Sun 27 Oct 2024 11.55 EDT
The multi-billionaire owner of the Washington Post,
Jeff Bezos, continued facing criticism throughout the weekend because executives from his aerospace company met with Donald Trump on the same day the newspaper prevented its editorial team from publishing an endorsement of his opponent in the US presidential election.
Senior news and opinion leaders at the Washington Post flew to Miami in late September 2024 to meet with Bezos, who had reservations about the paper issuing an endorsement in the 5 November election, the New York Times
reported.
Amazon and the space exploration company
Blue Origin are among Bezos-owned businesses that still compete for lucrative federal government contracts.
And the Post on Friday announced it would not endorse a candidate in the 5 November election after its editorial board had already drafted its endorsement of Kamala Harris.
Friday’s announcement did not mention Amazon or Blue Origin. But within hours, high-ranking officials of the latter company briefly met with Trump after a campaign speech in Austin, Texas, as the Republican nominee seeks a second presidency.
Trump met with the Blue Origin chief executive officer, David Limp, and vice-president of government relations, Megan Mitchell, the Associated Press reported.
Meanwhile, CNN
reported that the Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, had also recently reached out to speak with the former president by phone.
Those reported overtures were eviscerated by the
Washington Post editor-at-large and longtime columnist Robert Kagan, who resigned on Friday. On Saturday, he argued that the meeting Blue Origin executives had with Trump would not have taken place if the Post had endorsed the Democratic vice-president as it planned.
“Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do – and then met with the Blue Origin people,” Kagan told the Daily Beast on Saturday. “Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo.”
The Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, hired by Bezos in January,
defended the paper’s owner by claiming the decision to spike the Harris endorsement was his. But that has done little to defuse criticism from within the newspaper’s ranks as well as the wave of subscription cancelations that has met the institution."
Bribery?
