Washington Post editor Karen Attiah leads a discussion on Saudi hacking techniques at the 2019 Oslo Freedom Forum on May 28, 2019 in Oslo, Norway.
Julia Rinehart | Getty Images
The co-chairman of the annual National Association of Black Journalists The conference resigned on Tuesday in apparent reaction to that group’s decision to ask former President Donald Trump to speak at the conference and its career fair at Chicago on Wednesday, among other factors.
“To the reporters interviewing Trump, I wish them luck,” NABJ24 conference co-chair Karen Attiah she wrote in a social media post announcing her decision to resign from her position. “For everyone else, I look forward to meeting and reconnecting with all of you in the Windy City.”
“While my decision was influenced by a number of factors, I was not involved or consulted in any way in the decision to place Trump in such a format,” wrote Attiah, a Washington Post columnist who writes on international affairs and culture. and human rights issues.
The NABJ announced Monday that Republican presidential nominee Trump would “participate in a conversation with reporters” at the conference before attendees, sparking controversy among some members of the group.
The group said the event with Trump will be moderated by Rachel Scott, senior congressional correspondent for ABC News, Fox News’ Harris Faulkner, host of The Faulkner Focus and co-host of Outnumbered, and Semafor political reporter Kadia Goba.
Attiah’s announcement Tuesday came several hours before a source familiar with Vice President Kamala Harris’ plans said Harris, who is the de facto Democratic presidential nominee, would not attend the NABJ conference because of scheduling conflicts.
The NABJ team declined a request from Harris’ team for a “fireside chat” at the convention, according to the person who spoke to NBC News.
Harris’ father is Black and her mother was born in India. If elected president, she would be the first woman and the first person from South Asia to be elected president.
Founded in 1975, NABJ is the largest association of journalists of color in the United States. Over the years it has hosted speakers that have included then-Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, as well as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
CNBC reached out to Attiah and the NABJ, as well as a representative of Trump’s presidential campaign, for comment on Attiah’s resignation as convention co-chairman.
NABJ President Ken Lemon, in a video posted Tuesday on Twitter, said his group’s invitation to Trump was “absolutely no endorsement” of the Republican nominee.
“Every year, every presidential election, we’ve invited the presidential candidates to come,” Lemon said. “We called them both, got a yes from one of them, we’d love to get a yes from Kamala.”
“This is an opportunity for us to vet candidates on our own turf,” Lemon said.
Tia Mitchell, the Washington correspondent for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in her own post on X responded to the controversy over Trump’s appearance, saying she helped organize the event as a member of the NABJ political task force chair.
“I helped make this call happen. And it’s consistent with the calls NABJ has sent to every presidential candidate for decades,” Mitchell wrote in that post X. “But keep going to your feed. I will continue to work to create opportunities for reporters to interview the potential next President.”
Mitchell’s post was only visible to users she had given access to.
April Ryan, the White House correspondent for The Grio, who was NABJ’s 2017 Journalist of the Year, shot down the invitation to Trump.
“Reports of attacks on black female White House correspondents by the then president of the United States are not myth or speculation, but fact,” Ryan wrote in a post on X on Tuesday.
“Having an allegedly orchestrated meeting with the former president is an affront to what this organization stands for and a slap in the face to black women journalists (NABJ Journalists of the Year) who had to be protected from the wrath of this Republican presidential candidate who is promoting a authoritarian agenda that plans to destroy this nation and its democracy with Project 2025.”
During his presidency, Trump has been criticized for making racist comments when mentioned Haiti and African nations as “s—hole countries” during a meeting with senators at the White House in 2018.
Trump’s nephew Fred Trump III recounted hearing Donald Trump use the n-word twice, in his recent memoir, after finding his convertible had been clipped while parked. The Trump campaign said Fred Trump’s claim was “total fake news of the highest order.”
Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump speaks as he campaigns in Charlotte, North Carolina, US, July 24, 2024.
Marco Bello | Reuters
Donald Trump and his father Fred Trump were sued by the Ministry of Justice in 1973 for allegedly discriminating against black would-be tenants in their New York apartment complexes because of their race.
Donald Trump has noted that he and his father settled the case two years later “without admitting guilt.”
Attiah was named NABJ Journalist of the Year in 2019.
That same year he won a special George Polk Awardone of the most prestigious awards in American journalism, along with fellow Post columnist David Ignatius, for their writing on the assassination of Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey in November 2018.
Attiah, whose parents are from his African nations Ghana and Nigeriahad recruited Khashoggi to The Post and hired him.
Trump, who was president at the time of Khashoggi’s murder, rejected his conclusions US Central Intelligence Agency that the assassination was ordered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The State Department in March 2020, while Trump remained in the White House, blamed agents of the Saudi Arabian government for the assassination.
