Karihe Jean-PIerre may have held only four White House press briefings in December, but the Media Research Center’s Curtis Houck bothered to write about only two of them — then whined that press secretary Karine Jean-PIerre was slacking on the job. Here’s how his grievance-filled writeup for the Dec. 6 briefing (which took his three days to do) started:
On Friday afternoon, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre held the first White House briefing in 15 days and the first since President Biden went back on his word of denying he’d pardon his son, Hunter. Needless to say, the press corps came prepared to express their disgust with Jean-Pierre and the President making them look like fools and undermining their aura of respect for the rule of law.
Unfortunately, Jean-Pierre wanted nothing to do with Fox’s Peter Doocy, leaving the next Doocy Time for another day.
The Associated Press’s Zeke Miller went first with the pious take about Jean-Pierre promising during her first briefing to being honest with reporters and the American people cut against what happened here. Thus, he invited her to “explain to us, the American people, really why the information that you provided turned out not to be true.”
Of course, he avoided the l-word of lying:
Houck’s obsession over the pardon continued:
CBS’s Ed O’Keefe was at the back-end of the briefing and brought the heat, trying again on whether Biden has apologized to Jean-Pierre:
O’Keefe’s follow-up was dead on that Doocy would have probably asked: “One of the other things he often says is that voters should trust his, ‘word as a Biden.’ Should they still? This was a pretty big, defiant public pronouncement by him that he wasn’t going to do this.”
[…]Jean-Pierre reemphasized Biden still believes “in the American justice system,” but O’Keefe wasn’t buying any of this nonsense and actually argued President Biden and President-Elect Trump are now at a point where they seem to hold similar views of the justice system (click “expand”):
Houck refused to further discuss the fact that Trump has been actively avoiding accountability for the crimes he has committed.
Houck’s focus on the Dec. 11 briefing was, of course, to gush over a biased Fox News correspondent who wasn’t Peter Doocy:
Thursday’s White House press briefing featured longtime Democratic national security flack John Kirby for what’ll likely be one of his final times at the podium and he had quite the task to insist the Biden administration rejects that a hostile foreign actor or UFOs are behind the drones harassing residents in New Jersey, New York, and now surrounding states, but they still have no clue who’s behind them. Thankfully, Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich wasn’t amused by his dodges.
Like her colleague Peter Doocy, Heinrich kept it basic to start out:
[…]In the above video, her first follow-up cut to the chase of the insanity: “Basically, with what you’re looking at, how can you credibly tell people that there is no public safety threat, there’s no national security threat that there’s no reason to believe that a foreign government is involved?”
Kirby maintained “[t]here’s a lot more work to be done and we’re working closely with state and local authorities to gain more information,” but nothing has indicated “any national security or malicious intent or criminal activity.”
Heinrich wasn’t amused, telling Kirby that Democrats representing the affected areas have told members of their own party that, in Heinrich’s words, this hasn’t “been handled with a sense of urgency” and wondered if there’s been any warnings to relevant military sites.
When Kirby also ducked this and said there hadn’t been, Heinrich fact-checked him:
We though the MRC believed all fact-checkers are inherently liberal. Houck also edited out any reference to Jean-Pierre from the briefing, even though she did take questions during part of it.
Houck ignored two other briefings, on Dec. 11 (which featured Jared Bernstein of the Council of Economic Advisers) and Dec. 20. Apparently, he was running out of insults to hurl at Jean-PIerre.