Tipsheet

Guess Who the White House Is Blaming for Biden's Horrible Week (Spoiler: It's Not Biden)

Spencer Brown
Spencer Brown  |  February 09, 2024 3:00 PM

The day after Special Counsel Robert Hur's bombshell report on the investigation of President Biden's mishandling of classified documents, Karine Jean-Pierre brought White House Counsel's Office Spokesman Ian Sams into the briefing room to face reporters. 

Reading from prepared remarks, Sams laughably insisted that Biden "spoke powerfully," "thoughtfully," and "clearly" in his angry remarks on Thursday night — remarks in which Biden mixed up the presidents of Mexico and Egypt and made inaccurate statements about where classified documents were found in his private residence.

Despite Biden peddling his own inaccurate info, Sams proceeded to attack Special Counsel Hur and his investigation's report as "wrong and inaccurate." Sams also failed to justify the White House's contradictory stance on the report — that it is gratuitous and inaccurate but reaches an accurate conclusion — and instead could only insist Biden's innocence in the matter is "the truth."

What's more, Sams couldn't come up with an explanation for why Biden lied in his Thursday night remarks when he claimed all the classified materials in his home were in locking filing cabinets when we have photos of classified materials sitting in a disintegrating cardboard box in his Delaware garage. 

Not to be outdone by previous White House attempts at explaining away Biden's infirmity, Sams launched into a partisan screed from the White House briefing room that claimed "Republicans in Congress and elsewhere have been attacking prosecutors who aren't doing what Republicans want politically" and "have made up claims of a 'two-tiered system of justice' between Republicans and Democrats. They have denigrated the rule of law for political purposes," Sams insisted.

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"That reality creates a ton of pressure, and in that pressurized political environment, when the inevitable conclusion is that the facts and the evidence don't support any charges, you're left to wonder why this report spends time making gratuitous and inappropriate criticisms of the president."

So, Biden being a mess, taking classified documents home, and being unable to remember key facts about his life is all...Republicans' fault?

Sams continued with what appeared to be employing the kitchen sink defense of President Biden, throwing every excuse for Biden's handling of classified documents to reporters in the hope that some of it might stick. In addition to trying to blame Republicans, Sams insisted that classified documents are found where they're not supposed to be all the time, then blamed unknown Biden staffers for improperly packing classified materials sent to Biden's private residences. 

Notably, when asked point-blank, Sams would not deny that Biden had lapses in memory during his interviews with the special counsel just moments after saying the report's description of such lapses was inaccurate. 

In a similar vein, Sams sought to excuse Biden's memory issues by citing the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel. In the White House's view, apparently, because Biden "was managing an intensive international crisis," he shouldn't be expected to remember when he was VP or when his own son died.

Putting an exclamation point on the Biden administration's ongoing failure to fulfill its day-one promise to "bring transparency back" to the White House, Sams repeatedly refused to say whether the full transcript of Biden's interview would be released to provide full context about Biden's alarming lapses in memory documented in the report.