White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was the latest person from the Trump administration to ask photographers to take down a photo she thought looked bad, according to reports on Tuesday.
Leavitt didn’t like a picture of herself, a turkey, and her son during Thanksgiving.
She reached out to the news agency that took the photo, The New Republic reported. As a result, the image was taken down from Agence France-Presse’s website and also removed from Getty’s collection.
The New Republic described the photo, taken by Agence France-Presse photographer Andrew Caballero-Reynolds, as being shot from a low angle.
It shows Leavitt smiling in a way that made her look like she had a double chin, while she was holding her son. A turkey named ‘Waddle’ is also clearly visible in the photo.
This isn’t the first time the White House has had issues with photos.
Leavitt’s request happened around the same time that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also had problems with some pictures of himself.
The Pentagon stopped photographers from covering a press briefing about the U.S.-Israeli conflict in Iran after Hegseth’s team said recent photos of him weren’t flattering, The Washington Post reported.
The images were from a March 2 briefing, which came after Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in a joint U.S.-Israeli strike on February 28. It was the first time Hegseth had appeared in a briefing room and spoken to the press since June 26.
Agence France-Presse said they weren’t officially asked to remove the photo of Leavitt.
“We were told that White House staff found the photo unflattering, but there was no formal request to delete it, and there was no outside pressure,” said AFP’s director of brand and communications, Grégoire Lemarchand, in a statement to The Daily Beast.
The White House bullied Getty into deleting this photo of karoline leavitt….. pic.twitter.com/bpq9FkNB3x
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