On the evening of July 8, Politico White House reporter Megan Messerly told her colleagues that she was “wheels up” on Air Force One out of Ankara, Turkey, following a NATO summit. Messerly was serving as pool reporter, a critical role, especially with the president aboard, for transmitting reliable and timely information to the larger press corps that can’t logistically be in proximity to him. “We have been advised to keep our window shades in the press cabin closed. See you on the other side,” she wrote as the plane took off. A few hours later, Messerly reported that the plane arrived in the U.K. after an “uneventful flight, with no visitors to the press cabin.”

Donald Trump, for one, would not have visited the press cabin given that he wasn’t on the flight, as the Washington Post revealed in a blockbuster story last week. Trump had boarded the plane but secretly exited with several aides through an airport catering truck to a smaller plane due to an Iranian threat. That left members of the media and some administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on what was essentially a decoy plane. “It was a shock to learn,” Jacqui Heinrich, the new president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, tells me.

Officials have since told the Post that F-16s served as escorts for both planes and the CIA reportedly had “low confidence” in the Iranian threat. Still, journalists aboard the Ankara flight have expressed frustration about being kept in the dark about the president’s whereabouts, even long after the threat had passed, and potentially being put in danger. “We never were provided any opportunity to consent to being used like this,” one told the paper. “We aren’t Air Force or Secret Service — we didn’t sign up for this job to put ourselves on the line to protect the president.”

Heinrich, who serves as senior correspondent at Fox News and anchor of The Sunday Briefing, began her one-year term as president following last month’s rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which she’ll be in charge of next spring. I spoke to Heinrich about how she’s responding to the press being kept in the dark about the president’s whereabouts, her plans for next year’s dinner — yes, Trump is invited again — and press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s surprise departure.

What did you think when you saw this Washington Post report that President Trump didn’t fly with members of the press and some administration officials, as everyone was led to believe?

There were a few concerns. My inclination is always to try to create solutions. We have seen through our experience — I’ve been on this board for two terms now — and especially under this administration, we tend to get better results when we’re not fighting about it in the press and we’re actually going to them, explaining our position and asking for solutions and trying to figure out why something happened and how it happened that way and what we can do about it.

First, talk to the poolers who are on that plane to make sure that they are okay. Obviously, that can be a scary thing to learn about. And then talk to the managers of the outlets who represent our biggest organizations who have the most people pooling regularly to figure out what issues this raises for them.

One thing that I spelled out in the letter to our members that........

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