As the Trace Adkins song goes, you’re going to miss this, you’re going to want this back. Deep down, that’s surely the way at least some feel about the bizarre, entertaining, meandering, only occasionally informative, and stammering White House press briefings in 2024 under Karine Jean-Pierre.
With part one having covered 10 moments from January to May, below are the second 10 incredible moments that spanned from June to December when White House press corps – beyond Fox’s Peter Doocy, Jacqui Heinrich, and Edward Lawrence – did their jobs with respectful grillings that will likely morph into partisan grandstanding come January with the Trump administration.
As we did in part one (which you can see here), follow the links to see the top Doocy Times moments from 2021 and 2022 and then here for the top briefing throwdowns featuring Doocy and select colleagues from 2023.
The Associated Press’s Will Weissert earned a spot on our 2024 worst softballs list for promoting the liberal media’s pathetic insistence videos of President Biden appearing confused and mentally incapacitated were edited and manipulated. But in that same briefing, Newsmax’s James Rosen was incredulous about the latest video of Biden at the G7.
“So, this is much ado about nothing, and he is totally normal,” he sarcastically asked.
When Jean-Pierre doubled down, he let loose: “So, the — the majorities of American voters who are telling pollsters repeatedly for years now that they have serious concerns about this President’s cognitive fitness are being misled by cheap fake videos? Is that what you’re telling us?
It took until six days after the most consequential presidential debate in American history for Jean-Pierre to enter the Briefing Room and take questions.
As we wrote at the time, the “nearly an hour-long marathon of questioning” showed “not only” did the press corps “smell blood in the water regarding the Joe Biden presidency, but also (at least some) showed cowardice in suddenly pivoting from years of what could be the largest cover-up in U.S. history in Biden’s mental impairment.”
CBS’s Weijia Jiang had one of the more biting series of questions:
CBS’s @Weijia Jiang: “You just reminded us that President Biden had a cold on Thursday. What medications was he taking in the days or hours leading up to the debate?”
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 2, 2024
KJP: “And I can — I know that question has come in a couple of times, so as he was not taking any cold… pic.twitter.com/3Or5OfBQRy
Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich blasted Jean-Pierre for the “cheap fakes” narrative and asked if the White House had any regrets for this absurdly false narrative that the debate blew to pieces.
Even The New York Times (via White House reporter Michael Shear) made clear it was game over for Joe.
A day later, the press corps were back for more from across the spectrum. Real Clear Politics’s Philip Wegmann fact-checked one of Biden’s pants-on-fire lies from the debate:
.@PhilipWegmann: “I wanted to ask you about some of the things the President said last week.”
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 3, 2024
KJP: “Last week?”
Wegmann: “Yes.”
KJP: “Okay.”
Wegmann: “Obviously, with — 13 service members died at Abbey Gate —”
KJP: “Yeah.”
Wegmann: “— during the Afghanistan withdrawal, and… pic.twitter.com/ASnhafJu0F
In addition to Associated Press’s Seung Min Kim not buying Biden’s excuse of jet lag one bit, Heinrich had a devastating back-and-forth that included a simple request of Jean-Pierre to explain what Biden does outside the hours of 10:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.
The depths and variety of questions were further proof the liberal media were ready to move onto Kamala Harris, but Briefing Room Karen – aka NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell – still wanted to at least appear cordial with the regime.
Possibly the single biggest Briefing Room moment didn’t involve someone from Fox News, but instead CBS News and senior White House and campaign correspondent Ed O’Keefe.
Other reporters such as the AP’s Zeke Miller set the table with statements about the White House’s lack of credibility on matters of Biden’s health, but O’Keefe’s fiery response to Jean-Pierre refusing to acknowledge White House visits of a Parkinson’s doctor that caused the room to nearly implode.
Click the tweet to watch and read all parts of the exchange:
🧵I transcribed the full back-and-forth with KJP and CBS’s @EdOKeefe. It was WILD. You're welcome, America....
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 8, 2024
O’Keefe: “But, Karine, you’re not answering the — the very basic, direct question!”
Miller: “[Inaudible]”
O’Keefe: “Has the Parkinson’s [inaudible] —”
KJP: “Wait,… pic.twitter.com/Z3gGVDa5bl
This marked the first briefing since the first assassination attempt on now-President-Elect Trump and, with Biden still in the race, the press were still looking to push him out of the race. This time, they were relentless in pointing out Biden’s incendiary rhetoric against Trump and the Make American Great Again Movement.
Miller led off about whether Biden “regret[s] anything that he has said in the course of this campaign about his Republican rival or anybody else in the political space” and was followed by ABC’s Elizabeth Schulze pointing out Biden had a week earlier referred to Trump as a “threat” to America.
Heinrich had plenty to say as well, going hard at Biden’s penchant for broadening out the use of the word “threat” to describe Trump, his movement, and their agenda.
In addition to Fox Business’s Edward Lawrence wondering if Biden’s rhetoric bore any responsibility for this dangerous escalation, The Wall Street Journal’s Annie Linskey fished out one more example with Biden having said Trump would win “over my dead body” and a second Trump term was “deadly serious.”
Just days after President Biden dropped his reelection bid, Doocy was on the regime’s case following what we called “Biden’s mysterious, sudden departure from Las Vegas” due to “what his doctor insisted was just a positive Covid test and a week of isolation.”
“It — it would seem that people in this White House knew that President Biden was slipping and it was hidden from the American people, so who ordered White House officials to cover up a declining President,” he asked, much to Jean-Pierre’s chagrin.
Doocy added Biden had been vehement he wouldn’t quit and held a lengthy press conference at NATO proclaiming as such to only drop out 10 days later. In response, Jean-Pierre insisted there’s been “no cover-up” even though it’s “a narrative that you love.”
To his credit, the AP’s Miller had a hardball earlier: “If the President believes that it's best for the country that he not be in the Oval Office for another four years, how can you assure the American people that he's up to be in the office for the next six months?”
A three-week break proceeded this particular briefing, leaving a lot to be discussed. Doocy made headlines with this question after observing Vice President Kamala Harris spoke with two different dialects in the same day at two different rallies: “Since when does the Vice President have what sounds like a Southern accent?”
Amid Jean-Pierre’s stunned attempts to shut this down, Doocy continued: “Well, she was talking about unions in Detroit using one tone of voice – same line — that she — uh — she used the same line in Pittsburgh and it sounded like she at least had some kind of a southern drawl.”
Earlier, Wegmann had this stunning takedown of former DNC Chair Tom Perez, who was there to talk about infrastructure:
.@PhilipWegmann: “You talked a minute ago about high speed internet and I wanted to ask you, Brendan Carr, one of the commissioners on the FCC, has expressed frustration that, despite the $42 billion that was included in the President's infrastructure bill in 2021 through a… pic.twitter.com/WLqkD57fpz
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 3, 2024
The liberal journalists were predominantly focused on the pets of Springfield, Ohio hullabaloo, leaving Heinrich to ask about any number of topics. With her liberal colleagues focused on a proverbial shiny object, she asked about the cost of living for struggling Americans:
[T]here's a new analysis by the Republicans who are on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. They looked at seven battleground states and, according to their analysis, the average household is paying, for the same basket of goods and services on average, about $1,000 more per month compared to January 2021 and the numbers are pretty stark in places like Nevada and Arizona. It's almost $1200 a month. Georgia, it's $1,075 a month. North Carolina 1,017. Has President Biden's policies positioned the Vice President poorly in these states to win this election?
Heinrich stepped into fact-check Jean-Pierre when she wanted to make false claims about a Trump presidency wanting to cut entitlements, as well as point out Harris wouldn’t answer a basic question in the ABC debate:
[Y]ou had [Council of Economic Advisers Chairwoman] Lael Brainard say that we've turned the page on inflation, but American families aren't feeling that to the point where the Vice President didn't even directly answer the question in the debate. Do you believe that Americans feel they're better off than four years ago?
Doocy entered the fray of foreign aid vs. U.S. disaster relief when he asked Jean-Pierre about why the Biden-Harris “administration has money to send to Lebanon without Congress coming back, but Congress does have to come back to approve money to send to people in North Carolina.”
Jean-Pierre directly accused those mentioning this dichotomy (including Doocy) as “dangerous” and responsible for peddling “disinformation, misinformation.”
Doocy hung in there, stating this before all hell broke loose in a crosstalk-palooza:
But President Biden is fond of saying, “Show me your budget, and I will tell you what you value.” If he has got money for people in Lebanon right now, without Congress having to come back, what does it say about his values that there is not enough money right now for people in North Carolina who need it? That’s not misinformation.
As was the case with the September 19 and December 6 briefings, the depths to which the administration kept a clearly diminished Biden from the press got on the nerves of the liberal press corps. Of course, it was usually not framed as a deeper issue with Biden’s cognitive decline but rather a case of simply not wanting to speak to pesky reporters.
Despite the half-credit hackery, it was still tense on this day a week before Thanksgiving.
The typical potted plant M.J. Lee of CNN made her feelings plain after Biden avoided the press during his trip to the Amazon: “At this point, with two months left in the administration, does the White House see a real value in President Biden directly engaging with members of the press?”
A garbled Jean-Pierre word salad later, Lee unloaded:
If all of that is true, why on a six-day foreign trip where the President obviously had a robust American press corps traveling with him, did he not have a single engagement whether it is a press conference or maybe just speaking on the tarmac or really anywhere where he took questions from the press?
Later, Bloomberg’s Jenny Leonard fact-checked an excuse Jean-Pierre had deployed about why Biden avoided questions from journalists: “I was on the South America trip and I just want to know — if your explanation was that he was engaging with leaders, there was quite a bit of downtime and, of course, opportunities on the tarmac, which he has used before the election, so I don't know that that really explains why he didn't [talk to us].”
