The White House Correspondents’ Association has filed a formal complaint against Joe Biden after his aides refused to let him take any questions during his meeting in the Oval Office with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Prime Minister Johnson took three questions from the travelling press corps, but Biden’s handlers stepped in to shoo reporters away before they could ask Biden any questions.
The cacophonous shouting began while Johnson was still in mid sentence answering a reporter’s question, and while Biden appeared to be dozing off.
https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1440432388568281091?s=20
CBS News pointed out that it was not the usual protocol for only one side of a bilateral meeting at the White House to have to answer questions.
CBS News' @EdOkeefe reports that during Pres. Biden's bilateral meeting with British PM Boris Johnson, U.S. press questions about the southern border were shouted down by White House aides. The president's answer was undecipherable. pic.twitter.com/MeXVTcFEBX
— CBS News (@CBSNews) September 21, 2021
White House Correspondents’ Association President Steven Portnoy said in a statement that he filed a formal complaint to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
“The entire editorial component of the US pool went immediately into Jen Psaki’s office to register a formal complaint that no American reporters were recognized for questions in the president’s Oval Office, and that wranglers loudly shouted over the president as he seemed to give an answer to Ed O’Keefe’s question about the situation at the Southern Border,” the statement said.
“Psaki was unaware that the incident had occurred, and suggested that she was not in a position to offer an immediate solution,” the statement continued.
“POTUS Biden and British PM meet to discuss pandemic, trade and other issues. Johnson took 3 questions. White House aides shouted down U.S. attempts to ask questions. I asked Biden about the southern border and we couldn’t decipher what he said,” CBS News reporter Ed O’Keefe tweeted.
IN THE OVAL OFFICE… @POTUS Biden and British PM @BorisJohnson meet to discuss pandemic, trade and other issues. Johnson took 3 questions. White House aides shouted down U.S. attempts to ask questions. I asked Biden about southern border and we couldn’t decipher what he said. pic.twitter.com/A86kgdfsuc
— Ed O'Keefe (@edokeefe) September 21, 2021
White House aides, according to the new book, “Peril,” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, early on set up a “wall” to shield Biden from unscripted events and interviews, due to his tendency to become aggressive with reporters, and/or mangle his statements.
Their heavy-handed management of the press pool, and egregious lack of transparency has even Biden’s biggest media lapdogs crying foul.
The Daily Wire collected several more tweets from Blue Check journalists venting their frustration.
–Andrew Restuccia, The Wall Street Journal: “A chaotic scene in the Oval Office today as Boris Johnson unexpectedly took questions from British reporters, and White House aides shouted over American reporters as we tried to ask Biden questions.”
–Darren Grimes, GB News: “Boris Johnson took two questions from the British press, President Biden refused to take any, domestic or international. I can well imagine the headlines if Trump did the same, he’d be decried as an ‘authoritarian’, a ‘fascist dictator’ evading scrutiny.”
–Ashley Parker, The Washington Post: “Worth noting that Biden ran for office promising to restore democracy after 4 years of Trump. But today it was the British leader, NOT the American one, who spotlighted a key tenet of a flourishing democracy — respect for a free press — by taking questions from his press corps.”
–Stephen Miller, The Spectator: “Joe Biden has not taken or answered a single question regarding the border, FDA boosters getting shot down and the drone strike that killed 7 kids. His aides shout down reporters and herds them out of rooms, and the press complies with them.”
–Jennifer Jacobs, Bloomberg News: “Biden aides shouted over the president in the Oval Office, trying to prevent a back-and-forth between @POTUS and the press corps.”
White House aides were likely trying to shield their boss from having to answer questions about any number of horrendous, self-inflicted disasters that have erupted since Biden was put in office, including the crisis at the border, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the droning of an innocent family in Kabul, skyrocketing inflation, and a COVID pandemic that keeps getting worse despite the regime’s tyrannical mass vaccination campaign.
In an interview on One America News earlier this week, former President Trump’s spokesperson Liz Harrington went off on the administration for the multiple crises it has created.
Harrington expressed disgust that no one in the regime is being held accountable for slaughtering the Afghan aid worker and his family.
“Everybody needs to be fired. This entire illegitimate regime. Everything that we’re seeing here. They need to go,” Harrington told OAN host Natalie Harp.
“All of this is poisoned fruit from a stolen election tree. That’s what this is and it’s just going to get worse. We’ve seen it in Afghanistan. We’ve seen it in the border,” she continued.
“They do not care because they are not accountable to the voters. That’s what they think, but they’re wrong.”
We’re never going to get accountability until we actually get the real results of the election—we actually hold real hearings.”
Harrington noted that if the system were fair, we would have “ten special counsels” investigating the Biden administration on a host of scandals by now.