(DCNF)—White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday that her office restricted free-roaming media access after catching reporters secretly recording staff conversations.
The White House now bars reporters from entering the press secretary’s Upper Press office without an appointment, citing security concerns after decades of unrestricted access. In an interview with “Pod Force One,” Leavitt told Miranda Devine the change came after multiple incidents involving reporters loitering around sensitive information inside Upper Press.
“We have taken over the responsibilities of the National Security Council, thanks to the restructuring of Secretary Rubio when he became National Security Advisor. Steven Cheung and I are responsible for all communications matters, including national security,” Leavitt said. “And so we felt it became very inappropriate for reporters to be loitering around sensitive information in our offices. And we did, unfortunately, catch some unruly reporters recording us without our permission, listening in on conversations, eavesdropping.”
Leavitt said the White House imposed appointment-only access to Upper Press after reporters began hovering outside morning staff meetings.
“We’d have staff meetings in the morning. Some of the reporters started to pick up on that, and we’d walk out and they would be out there trying to listen. You know, if Secretary Rubio or the chief want to come in and brief us on something, you’d have reporters out there heckling them, and it just became an inappropriate work environment,” Leavitt said. “And so now they’re welcome up here, but it’s by appointment only. And so a lot of the outrage you’re seeing on Twitter, they’ve told us privately they’re OK with how this system works so long as they can still have appointments with me to understand the news of the day.”
Leavitt added she still gives reporters as much access as her schedule allows, saying that she splits much of her day between the Oval Office.
“I give them as much time as I possibly can on my schedule. Although a lot of my time is with the president and in the Oval Office and sitting in on meetings. So I try to devote as much time as I can to the press because that is my job, right? The basic duty is for me to work with the press and make sure they’re telling the truth out there,” Leavitt said.
Assistant to the President and White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung also defended the move, saying the White House imposed the restrictions after catching reporters secretly recording video and audio inside the West Wing. He added that some journalists even slipped into restricted rooms and tried to eavesdrop on private meetings.
“Press still has access to lower press where the press team sits and can answer all inquiries. Reporters can make appointments to see us in our offices,” Cheung wrote.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
So they gave the carpet muncher free reign to be stupid for 4 years and now they cry since they cannot be a foreign intelligence asset figures.
Makes sense to me. Wise move. Waiting to see how Fake News twists it. America First! ULTRAMAGA!
I think they should only allow those reporters who report truth and both sides of the story front room access and the other LIARS can sit in the back and listen this is a privilege to have any access
never have conversations of importance around bad people. they won’t just repeat what they hear. that would be the least of the problem. their real agenda is to LIE about what they hear and see. they’re piss ants, especially the females.
they are not journalists. they are activists.
those caught should be arrested and put in prison for espionage and treason
Bias political press agency’s have decided its ok to destroy America.. Kick them all out Donald.
Way past time to ban many of the failing legacy news networks who have not only been caught on multiple ocassions altering both audio and video and also guilty of lying by omission in their desperate attempts to denigrate Trump and his adminstration.
More relevant podcasters who many have gone to for their daily political takes should take their places.
The ones caught eavesdropping need to be referred to Pam Bondi for prosecution. Aggressive journalism is one thing, listening in on privileged conversations is step over the line.
The media are the enemies of the American People. There are no journalists, there are only propagandists. Throw them in jail. All they do is 1) lie, lie, lie and 2) bury the truth about liberal evil , corruption, and fraud.
What we actually need to do is annul Obama’s reversal of the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.
This will stop the present day propagandist urges of the US news outlets…
I’d believe an older sibling who told me he
turned off the electric fence before I’d believe ANYTHING
the MSM told me. Proven liars.
I’d take the additional step of naming those unscrupulous reporters and revoking their White House passes. If you can’t be a good example then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.