MS NOW’s Jen Psaki slammed the White House for whataboutism as officials scrambled to defend Donald Trump’s decision to revoke press access for CNN, Politico and MS NOW less than two months before the midterms. The host of “The Briefing” called the administration’s attempts to justify Trump’s actions by invoking former President Barack Obama just “as laughable as you’d expect.”
Psaki said Trump officials were “struggling to come up with an even remotely logical explanation” for the ban — which is now being challenged in court by MS NOW and the other media outlets — and pointed to what she said was a “sign they know they have lost the public argument here.”
“The White House is circulating a set of very, very defensive talking points to try and, I guess, retroactively justify the president’s latest completely rash decision,” she said. “And unsurprisingly, none of their justifications hold water whatsoever.”
As the MS NOW host explained, officials have tried to compare the move to a 2009 incident involving Obama and Fox News.
“I happened to be part of the Obama communications team at the time, and I lived through this, so let me just take the liberty of debunking this particular myth,” said Psaki, who was Obama’s deputy press secretary in 2009.
“Bear with me, because this is a bit weedy and has nothing at all to do with the press’ access to the president of the United States or access to the White House itself,” she began. She explained that back in 2009, the Treasury Department did not include Fox News on a list of outlets set to interview Treasury Department “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg.
When the other members of the White House pool noticed Fox News’ exclusion from the list, they said they would not move forward with their interviews unless the outlet was included.
But according to the White House, Psaki said, the network did not request an interview with Feinberg, and “when Fox News complained that they had been left off the list and the other networks backed them up, the Obama White House immediately granted Fox News an interview.”
Psaki said she thought the situation was “in no way close to what Trump did on Friday when he intentionally and deliberately banned three media outlets from accessing the White House, revoking their press passes.” She vowed to continue to correct the White House “as long as they keep throwing out absolute BS explanations.”
“Listen, I worked for Barack Obama for 10 years. There were plenty of days he was pissed off at Fox News and many other outlets, as any president is, and they were never banned from access to the building or to press conferences or to the briefings,” she said. “So the ‘Obama did it too’ excuse is just as laughable as you’d expect.”
You can watch Psaki’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
The post Jen Psaki debunks White House’s ‘laughable’ Obama excuse for Trump’s press ban appeared first on MS NOW.
