I don’t disagree with any of that. To be clear, I wasn’t using that tweet as evidence she asked permission, but rather that they had little prior relationship.
What I’m confused by is why he assumed that he had any presumption of privacy in the first place, given the fact that she’s a journalist and they don’t have a significant prior friendship. In my opinion, that’s not a situation where Kelsey is obligated to explicitly check if he’s ok with this being on the record. That ought to be the default assumption.
He at least claims he didn’t intend for the conversation to be public. Difficult to see how it didn’t occur to him that he should explicitly state it was off the record.