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Forgotten Fact Checks

Different Title, Same Job: Jen Psaki Serves Up Softballs to Former Colleagues in the Biden Administration

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Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki talks with U.S. climate czar John Kerry about climate change. (MSNBC/Screenshot via YouTube)

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at Jen Psaki’s first few months as an MSNBC host, call out a cruel and embarrassing headline from Slate, and cover more media misses.

Checking in with Jen Psaki

It’s been nearly four months since the launch of Jen Psaki’s new MSNBC Sunday morning show, Inside with Jen Psaki.

In that time, Psaki has set a Forgotten Fact Checks record: She earned a spot in the “media misses” for three consecutive weeks.

She let us know that she considers herself a journalist in April, less than one year since she was working as President Biden’s press secretary.

“Here’s how I think about it. I mean, first of all, journalism has changed dramatically,” she said. “And even when I was in the White House, working in government, it really was already all on a spectrum. It wasn’t just the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News, and then everything else wasn’t considered part of journalism, it’s all a big, broad, scope of things.”

“And so to me, journalism is providing information to the public, helping make things clearer, explaining things,” she added. “So I think there is a broad expansion of what that is.”

That expansion apparently includes airing softball interviews with your former bosses.

She invited U.S. climate czar John Kerry on her show for a fluffy conversation about Forrest Gump over ice cream. When Kerry suggested the “planet is at risk,” Psaki, who worked as Kerry’s spokesperson at the State Department during the Obama administration, quickly changed the subject to ice cream.

More recently, she conducted a similarly friendly interview with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in which the former press secretary asked thoughtful questions including what people get wrong about the progressive Squad member or what they don’t know about her:

But more than anything, Psaki fits right in with the rest of the MSNBC “journalists” because she has committed significant airtime to bashing Republicans and, this week, even led with a classic: Republicans are being compromised by a foreign entity.

Democrats famously sought to tie former president Donald Trump with Russia and also to dismiss initial reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation. Psaki herself previously likened conservative reporters to “representatives of the Russian and Chinese media asking questions directed by their government” and  “propaganda pushers.”

Now, Psaki is suggesting House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer, who is investigating the Biden family’s overseas business dealings, may have been “co-opted by a foreign agent”:

“How concerned are you that James Comer,” Psaki asked Representative Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) on Sunday, “was knowingly, unknowingly, working with, co-opted by a foreign agent?”

“I am just concerned that the House Oversight Committee, which has a very proud history, is suddenly being compromised in a really serious way. Our legitimacy is being eroded by the tactics adopted by Chairman Comer,” said Raskin, the ranking member of the committee.

Raskin and Representative Dan Goldman (D., N.Y.) sent a letter to Comer asking for information about Biden family whistleblower Gal Luft, who has been indicted by the DOJ on charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent, arms trafficking, violating sanctions, and making false statements.

Comer said last week that Luft, whom he described as a “very credible witness,” had “provided incriminating evidence to six officials from the FBI and the DOJ in a meeting in Brussels in March 2019. We have no reason to believe the FBI & DOJ acted on this info.”

House Republicans “essentially have said, ‘we will validate anybody who will say anything about the Bidens,’” Raskin told Psaki.

“There are real issues that are confronting our people and [Republicans] are off on this wild goose chase related to Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, and they’re main witnesses are people who are fleeing justice in America,” he added, referring to Luft.

Comer, in a statement, said that is “astonishing that Ranking Member Raskin and Rep. Dan Goldman didn’t mention that the Bidens received millions through their shell companies from the same CCP-linked company that paid Gal Luft.”

“If Democrats deem Mr. Luft as untrustworthy because he was getting money from CEFC, then why should we trust the Bidens who also received money from CEFC? Democrats have either been duped by the Bidens or they are intentionally misleading the American people. Democrats should join us in requesting the FBI’s record memorializing its interview with Gal Luft to get to the bottom of his claims about the Bidens,” he added.

On Sunday’s show, Psaki also accused Republicans of politicizing the Pentagon with their attempts to remove wokeness from the military.

The Republican-controlled House passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) last week, which included amendments to prohibit the Defense Department from paying or reimbursing expenses related to abortion services and to eliminate the Pentagon’s offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion and the related personnel. Another measure would deny coverage for gender-transition surgeries and hormone treatments for transgender service members.

The Pentagon also recently implemented a policy that would ban drag shows on military installations, thwarting plans on several installations to hold drag shows to celebrate Pride Month.

Nonetheless, Psaki dismissed the idea that the U.S. military has adopted woke ideology and forced servicemembers to undergo mandatory DEI training as a “right-wing conspiracy.”

“Another right-wing conspiracy theory is that the U.S. Military is a left-wing organization, indoctrinating troops with hundreds of hours of DEI training. The actual truth? The right-wing punching bag, diversity and inclusion training, is just one hour, one hour of initial military training for infantry soldiers. And it’s during the same period of training time that they spend 160 hours on rifle marksmanship,” Psaki said.

Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville, a Republican, has called for legislation to push back against the woke policies in the military. He recently argued that Democrats have been turning the U.S. military “from the world’s greatest killing machine to just another outfit for liberal social engineering.”

“Republicans like Tommy Tuberville love to claim politics and wokeness is affecting the readiness of our military. But right now, the only person politicizing the military seems to be him,” Psaki said.

In other attacks against Republicans in recent months, Psaki called Republicans hypocrites because “after all their outrage and fearmongering, they are the ones who want to defund law enforcement.” Her comments came in response to calls to defund the FBI and DOJ because of the politicization of those agencies.

“So if you worry about crime and want law enforcement to be fully funded and supported, the only place you should be directing your outrage for not doing more, it turns out, is MAGA Republicans and their now-indicted leader,” she said.

And earlier this month, she accused the GOP of trying to “recruit” Muslims against transgender people.

Psaki detailed an alleged “right-wing strategy to divide minority groups” after Muslim Americans held protests at several school boards over LGBT content in school curricula.

“The GOP is trying to recruit Muslim Americans, a community that makes up less than 2 percent of the US population, against another tiny marginalized group of Americans, transgender people,” Psaki said.

Headline Fail of the Week

Progressives proclaim to be feminist defenders of women — until those women are conservative. Then apparently it’s entirely appropriate to write think pieces about their eyebrows. This week, Slate brings us a hard-hitting report: “Casey DeSantis’ Face Has Sparked an Important National Debate.”

“As the plot thickens, so do her brows,” a subheading reads.

After claiming DeSantis been given the nicknames “Tacky Onassis” and “Walmart Melania,” Slate staff writer Heather Schwedel goes on to write, “Just how thick are this lady’s brows? Have they been growing? Are Casey DeSantis’ eyebrows angling to seize new territory? Do they have . . . political ambitions? Is it possible they are bodily manifestations of her increasing influence over her husband’s presidential campaign? Should we treat them as prophets?”

Interesting that Schwedel dares to question whether the First Lady of Florida is classy while writing such an embarrassing attack on another woman’s appearance.

Media Misses

  • A recent Business Insider story about outbound migration in Florida gave the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin the perfect opportunity to dunk on Ron DeSantis. Rubin didn’t let the fact that Business Insider had corrected its reporting on Tuesday keep her from using the incorrect data to fit her narrative days later.“Florida might pay for MAGA cruelty and know-nothingism,” she warns, and cites data that allegedly shows Florida had more outbound migration in 2021 than even California or New York. But Business Insider had accidentally swapped the number of people who moved out of the state with the number of people who moved into the state, later amending its headline to read: “We got it wrong: More people moved out of New York and California than Florida in 2021.”
  • Washington Post style reporter Emily Yahr claims the success of country singer Luke Combs’s cover of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car has sparked a “complicated” conversation on race. “Although many are thrilled to see ‘Fast Car’ back in the spotlight and a new generation discovering Chapman’s work, it’s clouded by the fact that, as a Black queer woman, Chapman, 59, would have almost zero chance of that achievement herself in country music,” the story claimed. But when the author of the story shared her work on Twitter, a community note was quickly added that noted, “‘Fast Car’ by Tracy Chapman was nominated for 3 Grammy Awards including Record of the Year and Song of the Year. She won for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Best New Artist. She has 7 other nominations for Grammy Awards and two wins.”
  • That The View’s Ana Navarro would rush to the defense of Hunter Biden should come as little surprise at this point, but this week, she took it a step further by suggesting the cocaine found in the West Wing of the White House this month could have actually been planted there by someone looking to make the younger Biden look bad. After the Secret Service closed its investigation into the cocaine last week, co-host Joy Behar asked the panel if the whole ordeal is “more fodder” for the Republican “conspiracy machine.””No matter what the answer would have been, they were always going to blame Hunter Biden, as I said before and I’m gonna continue to say it and we’re gonna see it for the next year,” Navarro said. “They are weaponizing Hunter Biden against his dad as an effective tool to get his dad to lose his cool and to get his dad to, you know, feel the heartache. They’re going to weaponize Hunter Biden.”
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