Curtis Houck scaled back his Doocy-gasming and focused on another biased right-wing reporter at the April 4 White House press briefing:
Near the end of a tense White House press briefing Thursday dominated by questions about Israel, the New York Post’s Steven Nelson drew terse replies from Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre over his recent reporting on powerful White House aide Anthony Bernal being accused of “bull[ying] and verbally sexually harass[ing] colleagues over more than a decade.”
Not only has Bernal has vehemently denied the allegations in Nelson’s heavily-sourced story, but Chief of Staff Jeff Zients went on the record to defend him and Bernal could be viewed as unfirable given he’s so close to First Lady Jill Biden she’s reportedly called him her work spouse.
[…]Jean-Pierre stepped in before he could finish with the well-known declaration from Biden in 2021 that he’d fire on the spot anyone who mistreats a colleague, scoffing that she doesn’t “know who your sources are, so….I can’t speak to that” since “they’re blind sources.”
Adding she won’t ever speak about “personnel investigations”, she sang Bernal’s praises as someone she’s “known…for more than a decade” and counts him as both “a friend” and “a colleague” she’s “worked closely with”.
To Nelson’s credit, he eventually stepped in despite Jean-Pierre’s continued filibustering: “I just gotta press you on this because the President said he would fire people for disrespecting colleagues and there’s no investigation.”
Jean-Pierre continued to screech and make Nelson’s point, insisting this is all “unfounded” claims.
Note that Houck buried the fact that Nelson’s “heavily sourced” story is all anonymous sources, which Houck’s employer tells us not to trust (when they make claims that make conservatives look bad, anyway). Houck did make sure to praise a different Fox employee for pushing right-wing narratives:
A few minutes before Nelson, the Fox Business Network’s Grady Trimble called out the Biden administration’s failed attempts to make fetch happen and force Americans to buy electric vehicles (EVs). Jean-Pierre, appearing prepared for the question threw out a littany of numbers in attempt to make it seem like EVs are both afforable and exploding in popularity:
Thankfully, Trimble followed up on this gobbledygook: “So, is it realistic to go from about seven or eight percent of sales to 50 percent of sales in eight years if the automakers themselves are cutting back pro — on production?”
It was here the Jean-Pierre we’ve come to know emerged as she fumbled through with claims “that— that U.S. manu — U.S. manufacturing jobs have increased” and “[j]obs have indeed increase [sic] and when you see a boom like this, that means you need auto workers, right? It can’t happen on its own…and we want to see a manufacturing industry that’s for the future of this — of this country”.
Trimble’s other subject concerned President Biden’s hypocrisy on Chinese-owned TikTok: “If President Biden is concerned enough about TikTok to bring it up on a call with the president of China, why is he and why is the Vice President — why are they still making videos for TikTok?”
Though Jean-Pierre isn’t adept at many things, one thing she does know what to do is what she did here: punt to the reelection campaign.
Houck devoted attention to another Fox News reporter in his writeup of the April 9 briefing:
After a White House press briefing dominated Tuesday by questions about foreign policy (Israel, Japan, and even Haiti to name a few) for National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, little time was left over for Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Jacqui Heinrich was back in the Fox News Channel seat and she pressed Jean-Pierre over new anti-Israel rhetoric from the radical Islamists who populate Dearborn, Michigan and then President Biden appearing to claim Americans in the Republican Party are murderers.
“A couple days ago in Deaborn, there were protesters chanting, ‘death to America’ and ‘death to Israel.’ Does the President condemn that,” Heinrich asked, cutting right to the chase.
When Jean-Pierre said “yes”, Heinrich drilled down: “Is the President at all concerned that Dearborn is becoming – is facing a risk of becoming a hotbed of any sort of homegrown threats?”
Jean-Pierre somehow didn’t invoke Islamophobia and instead replied she didn’t “have any intelligence to share with you on that”, but said it’s “something that we’re always very vigilant about”.
Oof. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if Jean-Pierre is forced to clean this up in a few days.
After some sputtering along about how the Biden regime “will condemn any – any of violent rhetoric” and they’ve been “very consistent”, Heinrich had one more missive concerning whether Biden himself would speak publicly about it: “Should we see a – should we expect a statement from the President on that? It was a pretty significant display.”
Jean-Pierre shrugged it off as any Press Secretary should do (if they had any self-worth): “I mean, you’re hearing from me. I think that’s important.”
For the April 11 briefing, Houck obsessed over a clunky answer from Jean-Pierre:
Given the fact that much of Thursday’s news cycles were dominated by the death of O.J. Simpson, it shouldn’t have been that surprising Simpson was invoked during the White House press briefing. Somehow, the ever-inept Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had a cringeworthy answer.
The Associated Press’s Darlene Superville has always been a Biden hack, so she probably thought she was helping the White House out with her third question being about the corrupt and disgraced former NFL player (after two about Israel): “Was there any reaction from the President to O.J. Simpson’s death? Do you know if they ever crossed paths? If so, how? When?”
Setting aside the unintentionally somewhat on-the-nose “crossed paths” phrase, Jean-Pierre’s answer showed complete callousness to the family of those many believe Simpson killed, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
“So, I’ll say this,” Jean-Pierre began (as she often does) before adding “[o]ur thoughts are with — with his families during this difficult time — obviously, with his family and loved ones.”
Yeeesh. Based on the creative litany of responses to a video tweet of the exchange, the public certainly has been left scratching its head.
That “video tweet” was made by Houck himself, reminding us once again that he get paid to spew hate at Jean-Pierre. Indeed, so obsessed with Houck with that question that he had to do a second post on other happenings — specifically, slobbering over Fox employees advancing right-wing narratives — during that briefing:
Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre went solo for Thursday’s White House press briefing, so she shouldered all the questions, including the Middle East and the economy. It was on this latter topic where she was put through the gauntlet by Fox News’s Jacqui Heinrich and Fox Business’s Edward Lawrence as they called out the administration’s channeling of Jim Carey in Dumb and Dumber in denying persistently high inflation.
Lawrence cut to the chase with a brutal inflation fact-check: “[Y]esterday in the Rose Garden, the President said that when he came into office, inflation was skyrocketing, but it was 1.4 percent in January of 2021 and that was the 11th consecutive month at that time under two percent. So, it was the President misleading Americans?”
Unsurprisingly, Jean-Pierre refused to engage and instead doubled down about inflation having taken off because, when Biden took office, the country was “a pandemic” that “was closing down businesses, closing down schools, uh, and so, it was drastically disrupting the supply chain” followed by the war in Ukraine.
Lawrence didn’t buy it: “But the President didn’t say the supply chain was being disrupted. He said inflation was skyrocketing.”
[…]Heinrich cited a report in Politico from former Chief of Staff Ron Klain in which he allegedly said President Biden needs to focus more on soaring prices Americans are paying than fixing bridges.
After bringing that up, Heinrich tied it to the lack of a White House statement on the latest Producer Price Index (PPI): “We didn’t get any statement today on the PPI index. You know, why aren’t we hearing more from the White House about the issues that people are facing at grocery stores and paying rent?”
Jean-Pierre’s prepared answer cited the State of the Union as proof Biden has “made very clear about what he understands what the Americans are facing and he’s talked at almost every — every event that he’s had….about lowering costs”.
There was enough Fox News narrative-pushing during the briefing that Houck didn’t even need Peter Doocy. Not that it will stop him from mancrushing over Doocy the next time he appears in the White House briefing room, of course.