Opinion: I Was Scott Jennings’s Student. He Should Be Nowhere Near the White House Podium

Photo Illustration by Victoria Sunday/The Daily Beast/Getty Images I enrolled in Harvard University’s course on Modern American Political Campaigns in the fall of 2020.

Though I was generally interested in the subject, as part of my dual degree program at Harvard’s law school and school of government, I had also signed up because of one of the instructors, Robby Mook.

Mook was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, and I had met him a few times in passing while working on the campaign’s digital team at its Brooklyn headquarters.

Scott Jennings , his Republican co-professor, was a name I didn’t recognize.

Jennings had joined Harvard’s Institute of Politics as a resident fellow in 2018, a year after the school’s controversial offer of that same fellowship to Trump’s first Press Secretary Sean Spicer .

He later became an adjunct professor.

So I did what any curious student does: I looked him up.

Most people today know Jennings as a smirking Trump defender on CNN .

Jennings provides an endless supply of ragebait for CNN’s roundtable shows and is paid handsomely to do it .

Far fewer remember the multiple White House controversies he’d been embroiled in earlier in his career, which betray the deeper ethical rot we now see as he contorts himself on cable for MAGA approval.

My Google search revealed that he was entrenched in one of the Bush White House’s biggest ethics scandals, over whether federal prosecutors were being pushed out for failing to serve Republican political interests.

Take then- New Mexico U.S.

Attorney David Iglesias, who had angered Republicans by not moving aggressively enough on voter-fraud cases and a corruption investigation involving Democrats.

Jennings, a special assistant to the president , wrote that the White House should “ move forward with getting rid” of him—and Iglesias was later fired.