Less than a month after the cloak-and-dagger caper came to light, Netflix is dropping a new documentary on the controversial use of a decoy plane by President Donald Trump on his return from a NATO summit in Turkey earlier this summer. The latest installment from “Instadocs,” Netflix’s “expedited documentary series,” will explore the July maneuver by the Secret Service that left some journalists in the White House press pool fuming about whether the Trump administration had put reporters at unnecessary risk without informing them beforehand. The episode will premiere on Friday.
Netflix promises that the documentary episode will include interviews from reporters on board the decoy plane, from which Trump disappeared via an airline catering container truck. Details of the maneuver were first rreported in mid-August. The reporters interviewed include MS Now’s Carol Leonnig, the Washington Post’s Dan Lamothe, AP photographer Alex Brandon, and reporter Gram Slattery.
A former Secret Service agent and Air Force One flight attendant are also interviewed. The president’s disappearance from the July 8 flight wasn’t communicated to reporters or staff remaining on board the plain, and Trump used a separate military jet to depart Turkey. Reporters, military experts and pundits debated afterwards whether the press pool and White House staff should have been loaded onto a plane without Trump given the active Iranian assassination threat that reportedly drove the president to use a decoy.
At least one Democrat on the Hill demanded a congressional inquiry. The Washington Post first broke news of the decoy operation last month. Only a handful of aides, including the president’s close assistant Natalie Harp, traveled with Trump on board the military jet used as a secure backup measure.
The public was led to believe Trump was on the Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet where reporters and staff remained, and was filmed boarding the plane before it departed Ankara. The move was condemned at the time by Ned Price, former State Department spokesman under Joe Biden, as well as former Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod. As far as I know, it’s unique to this White House,” said Price.
Robert McDonald, interviewed for the Netflix documentary, previously spoke to The Independent about the decoy operation and called it a necessary security measure. You've got to make things happen.” He added that he was confident there were “other assets that were up in the air” in place to protect the “decoy” Air Force One jet, which ferried journalists and staff from Ankara to a British airbase, then on to the U.S. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
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