White House Correspondents’ Association president Kelly O’Donnell said Thursday a Biden spokesman’s recent letter to the association’s members encouraging them to reframe their coverage of special counsel Robert Hur’s damning report on President Biden’s handling of classified documents was “misdirected.”
“As a non-profit organization that advocates for its members in their efforts to cover the presidency, the WHCA does not, cannot, and will not serve as a repository for the government’s views of what’s in the news,” O’Donnell said in a message to members about White House spokesman Ian Sams’s letter. “The White House has far reach to make its positions known on [special counsel Robert Hur’s] report or any other matter.”
She called the letter “misdirected” and said it was “inappropriate” for the White House to transmit the letter via internal distribution channels meant to be used only for exchanging logistics and need-to-know information.
O’Donnell suggested the White House should have reached out to specific correspondents, editors, and bureau chiefs with any concerns. “In its 110-year history, our association has never controlled or policed the journalism that is published or broadcast by our members or their employer,” O’Donnell said.
“The WHCA welcomes — and its members surely seek — further opportunities to ask questions of the president, the White House counsel, or the president’s personal attorney on this matter,” she added.
Sams sent a letter to O’Donnell asking reporters to reframe their coverage of the report, accusing journalists of having misconstrued the findings from Hur’s report. He accused journalists of relying only on the earliest part of the report, which says investigators “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen” rather than mentioning information included later on in the report.
“This appears to be what the widespread media coverage is based on. Perhaps the Special Counsel could have better written this sentence as ‘found some evidence’ related to these two buckets, but after exploring the theory and reviewing the full totality of facts and evidence available, — not just some of it, the Special Counsel determined that the evidence refuted willful retention or disclosure.”
Sams disputes the assertion that Biden willfully retained documents, citing page 12 of the report in which Hur says other classified materials held at the Penn Biden Center and Biden’s Delaware estate could have been brought to those locations by accident.
“The FBI recovered additional marked classified documents at the Penn Biden Center, elsewhere in Mr. Biden’s Delaware home, and in collections of his Senate papers at the University of Delaware, but the evidence suggests that Mr. Biden did not willfully retain these documents and that they could plausibly have been brought to these locations by mistake,” Hur wrote.
The report later notes that there is a “shortage of evidence” to prove that Biden placed Afghanistan documents in ordinary folders alongside troves of papers from his decades-long political career, and investigators also found that evidence “does not establish that Mr. Biden willfully disclosed national defense information” to his ghostwriter, Mark Zwontizer.
Sams acknowledged that members of the association “cover challenging and complex topics day in and day out.”
“Your jobs are not easy. But they are important. When significant errors occur in coverage, such as essentially misstating the findings and conclusions of a federal investigation of the sitting President, it is critical that they be addressed,” Sams added.
Hur is set to testify about his investigation into President Biden’s handling of classified documents in a public hearing before the House Judiciary Committee next month, a source familiar with the plans confirmed to National Review.
Hur, who released a more than 300-page report on his investigation last week, will testify before the committee on March 12, as the Washington Examiner first reported.