Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Max Several White House reporters staying at the Intercontinental Hotel in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to cover President JOE BIDEN’s highly-scrutinized visit were peppered by repeated calls to their hotel landlines, sometimes at odd hours. The person on the other end wasn’t a hotel staffer offering room service or a late checkout. It was a highly-aggressive PR flack working on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government eager to shape the narrative of Biden’s trip to the kingdom. The flack was NICOLLA HEWITT. She’s a longtime American PR expert who has worked for television networks, the Clinton Global Initiative, and media and business figures such as KATIE COURIC and RICHARD BRANSON. More recently, she was retained by the Saudis. Working reporters is part of any public relations official’s job. But according to multiple people on the trip, Hewitt took it to a notable extreme. She was a roving presence at the Intercontinental, where reporters stayed during the Saudi leg of Biden’s Middle East tour. In addition to posting up in the lobby to chat up journalists, several people told West Wing Playbook that she called their hotel phone lines directly to offer guidance, pitch ideas, and dangle top Saudi officials who were giving on- and off-the-record chats. Several reporters on the trip described the efforts, including the calls, as “aggressive.” Hewitt is registered to represent the Saudi’s Ministry of Media and promote “the changing way of life in Saudi Arabia,” among a number of firms tasked with boosting the kingdom’s image in the U.S. In January, when she registered with the Department of Justice, she reported that she was paid a monthly fee of roughly $15,000, depending on the exchange rate, for her work. According to a filing, many of her early media contacts on the Saudis behalf centered around the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Biden’s trip was an important moment for the Saudis. One administration official told West Wing Playbook that although it's not unusual for foreign countries to be concerned with U.S. press, top Saudi officials were particularly sensitive to the country’s portrayal in Western media outlets. It didn’t all go smoothly. As the Washington Post reported, Saudi officials initially excluded the publication’s reporters from a media briefing during the weekend, with Hewitt saying that she “can’t engage with The Post on that,” adding, “Don’t kill me, I’m just the messenger.” U.S. intel has assessed that Saudi Crown Prince MOHAMMED BIN SALMAN was responsible for the country’s murder of Washington Post writer JAMAL KHASHOGGI. But the aggressive Saudi pressure to see the government’s views reflected on American media had some results. Hewitt and others helped top Saudi officials get on Americans news airwaves all that week: Minister of State for Foreign Affairs of Saudi Arabia ABDEL AL-JUBEIR sat down for high-profile interviews with PBS, CNBC and Fox News, while CNN interviewed Saudi Foreign Minister Prince FAISAL BIN FARHAN. As Fox’s JACQUI HEINRICH noted in a tweet, after Biden left the country, the foreign minister agreed to a second interview just two days later to push back on the president’s comments about confronting the Saudis over Khashoggi’s murder. For its part, the administration declined to engage in tit-for-tat exchanges with the Saudis. Several television networks that interviewed Saudi officials reached out to the White House for an official response. But the administration instead worked to book officials like AMOS HOCHSTEIN, Biden’s energy security adviser, for separate appearances. The Saudi Arabia PR effort around Biden’s trip wasn’t just targeted at those reporters who accompanied the president. Prior to the trip, the Saudi Royal Embassy also tasked LS2group, a comms and government affairs firm headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa, with pitching the embassy’s spokesperson for interviews to local outlets. According to filings with the Department of Justice, the firm contacted a radio station in South Dakota, a television station in Iowa, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Cleveland.com, The Detroit News, among others. MESSAGE US — Are you RORY BROSIUS, executive director of the White House’s Joining Forces Initiative? We want to hear from you! And we’ll keep you anonymous if you’d like. Or if you think we missed something in today’s edition, let us know and we may include it tomorrow. Email us at westwingtips@politico.com .
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