President Joe Biden does not hire any dummies. He does not go down to the country club and snap up a couple of his good golfing buddies to run the Veterans’ Administration (VA). He did not pick a person who called out at his political rallies “Lock her up! Lock her up!” And he certainly did not hire women based upon whether their daddies were former Republican governors. Take Jen Psaki for example.
The White House Press Secretary has a lengthy list of credentials. Not only that, she has worked with top-level White House leaders since 2015. In 2012 she was named as one of “50 Politicos to watch.”
The New York Times has described her as:
‘[T]he unflappable and genial point-person.’
Psaki does not just respond to the surface question. She looks beneath the obvious and drags that information out into the light, too. Corporate media and many in Washington just repeat the Republican talking points as factual. And we know that the GOP plays a mean game of badminton with the truth.
Fox News reporter Kristen Fisher tried to play gotcha when she quizzed the press secretary, Psaki replied [The White House transcript will appear here]:
‘I’m still confused about what changed between 1 p.m. on Friday and around 4:30 p.m. on Friday to go from we’re not raising the refugee cap to we are raising the refugee cap by May 15. What changed in those three and a half hours?’
Psaki answered:
‘We never said we’re not raising the refugee cap. In the morning we said, and it was actually in the information we put out, was once we reach 15,000, we will raise it. That was not accounted for in some of the ways people were digesting the information. And we wanted to be clear and send a message that we are a country that is welcoming refugees. Let’s be clear. We are changing the policies of the last administration.’
The press secretary has tried to be as transparent as possible with the press, and thus far, she has held closely to that promise. According to The Vogue Magazine, she said:
‘I have deep respect for the role of a free and independent press in our democracy and for the role all of you play.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbS7AOt1k8c
CBS News reported her “groundbreaking move:”
‘[S]he restored the daily briefings, and that there would also be regular briefings by the White House team supervising the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic [and] announced another groundbreaking move: An American Sign Language interpreter will attend every daily briefing.’
Psaki was a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at Georgetown, a nonpartisan foreign-policy think tank with centers in Washington D.C., Moscow, Beirut, Beijing, Brussels, and New Delhi.
She was also deputy press secretary and deputy communications director during the financial crisis when President Barack Obama took office. Psaki was the State Department spokesperson under John Kerry, and later White House communications director.
Watch Psaki and the reporter in action in the video below:
The Mueller Report Adventures: In Bite-Sizes on this Facebook page. These quick, two-minute reads interpret the report in normal English for busy people. Mueller Bite-Sizes uncovers what is essentially a compelling spy mystery. Interestingly enough, Mueller Bite-Sizes can be read in any order.
