A radio host who interviewed President Joe Biden after his disastrous debate performance revealed on Saturday that White House officials sent her a list of questions to ask Biden ahead of time.
Andrea Lawful-Sanders, a radio host with Philadelphia’s WURD, told CNN’s Victor Blackwell on Saturday morning that the White House gave her a list of eight questions before her interview with Biden earlier this week.
“The questions were sent to me for approval; I approved of them,” Lawful-Sanders said. She approved four of the eight questions and asked them during the interview.
A radio host who interviewed President Biden Wednesday tells me the White House sent her the questions before the interview. pic.twitter.com/9L6PRaUvgG
— Victor Blackwell CNN (@VictorBlackwell) July 6, 2024
Blackwell interviewed Lawful-Sanders alongside Milwaukee radio host Earl Ingram and said he noticed similarities between the questions asked by both radio hosts. Lawful-Sanders and Ingram have significant black audiences in cities crucial to Biden’s reelection campaign.
Upon hearing that the White House sent Lawful-Sanders questions, Blackwell expressed confusion over how the White House can use these interviews to claim that Biden is mentally fit for the presidency when he knew what the radio hosts would ask him. After the CNN interview, Ingram confirmed to ABC News that he was given five questions from Biden officials and asked four of them.
Providing questions to an interviewer ahead of time is a significant breach of journalistic ethics, particularly given the importance of Biden’s media appearances following his nightmarish presidential debate showing. Throughout the debate, Biden, 81, struggled to form coherent sentences and mangled his words, causing panic among Democrats about his mental fitness and the possibility that he could lose to former president Donald Trump this November.
Biden, although seeking to reassure Americans that he is mentally fit to hold the nation’s highest office, repeatedly stumbled over his words during his appearance on Lawful-Sanders’s show.
At one point, Biden said he was the first black woman to serve with a black president, an apparent garbled reference to his vice presidency under former president Obama and the current vice president, Kamala Harris. Another gaffe came when Biden told Lawful-Sanders that he was the “first president that got elected statewide in the state of Delaware, when I was a kid,” apparently meaning to say that he was the first Catholic elected statewide.
“Hosts are always free to ask the questions they think will best inform their listeners,” Biden campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt told the New York Times. She clarified that Biden campaign officials do not condition interviews on whether the interviewer accepts the questions.
“In addition to these interviews, the president also participated in a press gaggle yesterday as well as an interview with ABC. Americans have had several opportunities to see him unscripted since the debate,” she added. National Review has reached out for comment.
The White House helped draft the questions, and then the Biden campaign sent them to WURD, a person familiar with the events told Axios. Hitt later told the outlet that the “White House did not manage the process or the questions.”
On Friday, Biden sat down with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos for an interview that many believed was necessary to save his presidential campaign.
Biden’s interview with Stephanopoulos failed to reassure viewers that he is capable of the presidency, as shown by the statement on Saturday from swing-state representative Angie Craig (D., Minn.) calling for Biden to step away from the presidential ticket.
“I was exhausted” during the debate, Biden told Stephanapoulos. “I didn’t listen to my instincts in terms of preparing, and I had a bad night.”
Biden declined Stephanapoulos’s suggestion that he receive an independent medical examination and rejected calls for him to step aside.