Try Harder: WH’s Karine Jean-Pierre Walks into Another Buzzsaw of Doocy, O’Keefe

The following are the It’s the second consecutive dayKarine Jean Pierre, White House Press Secretary, struggled Thursday to provide any cogent spin to support the Biden administration’s gun control policies and the months-long delays in responding to the crisis involving baby formula. Once again, it was Fox’s Peter Doocy and CBS’s Ed O’Keefe that most agitated Jean-Pierre.

Doocy took on the gun issue and pointed out an inconvenient truth about Biden’s schedule: “If the President thinks that Congress must act immediately to end this epidemic of gun violence, is he going to bring the key players from Capitol Hill to the beach with him tonight?”

Jean-Pierre found an answer to his question, and Doocy continued to keep the fire burning: “Isn’t that a big part of candidate Biden’s whole thing that he knows how to get things done in Congress?”

When she replied that it is still part of Biden’s shtick as “he’s beaten the gun lobby before,” Doocy countered: “Then why not invite these lawmakers who haven’t beaten the gun lobby and say this is how it’s done?”

She ignored that, so Doocy tried to slow things down for her by saying he was granting her the premise that Biden “has a lot of legislative experience.”

Jean-Pierre replied by trying to throw Doocy out with a quip. “Do you want to go to the beach with the President tonight? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

Doocy kept after it: “[I]People are constantly dying, so why would the President claim that he is going to allow it some room?[?]”

He later invoked Chicago’s gun laws:

The gun laws are some of the toughest in America. There were 47 victims of the shootings there on Memorial Day Weekend, and nine of those killed. So which law could have stopped that? Are we to believe that Chicagoans who shoot each other legally are buying guns?

Jean-Pierre didn’t have an answer and resorted instead to red flag laws in California (Connecticut, Florida), Indiana, and Florida.

Doocy wrapped with another stinging question, which was whether this last-minute gun speech was scheduled “to get people talking about something” besides baby formula and inflation.

Jean-Pierre scoffed, arguing it’s because “people have died in the last couple weeks.”

O’Keefe directly followed and inquired whether Jean-Pierre did what she said she would do on Wednesday in ask the President when specifically in April was he told of the baby formula shortage.

When she said Biden speaks for himself, O’Keefe showed agitation on display from Wednesday and explained why the timeline mattered (click “expand”):

O’KEEFE: Well, part of the reason we — I asked it, at least is you talked yesterday about February 17th, and February 18th, and what we are trying to figure out is when exactly in April was he told? It was April 1. Did it happen on April 1st? Did it happen on April 30th? Or was it April 15? 

JEAN-PIERRE: I don’t have a date to share with you. He spoke with me yesterday and said it was April. So, that — that matters. 

O’KEEFE: Take it down — take it down a level from him —

JEAN-PIERRE: Okay, yeah, yeah.

O’KEEFE: — into the staff of the White House because part of the reason that there is so much curiosity about this across town is because, as you know, there have been stories written over the last several days and weeks about how things are going here in the West Wing, how things are operating. So, we have to ask, “Who was first told?” Whether it was the FDA or the Department of Health and human services or USADA here in the West Wing. What is the process of getting from this person to the President? It’s completely understandable. It is a complex system that has thousands of functions.

(….)

O’KEEFE: Something else could crop up suddenly as an unforeseen crisis, like this one. And so, we’re trying to get a sense of how things operate here inside the West Wing and how they eventually rise to the level of presidential involvement that then lead to things like evoking the Defense Protection Act five — four, five months after the initial flags were raised.

JEAN-PIERRE It’s not just the economy. There’s also COVID and climate change. We have many issues to address. That’s how the White House is run. That’s how any White House is run, so there are regular channels of — of White House senior staff and that’s how it gets elevated. You’re asking me for a specific name, I am telling you how the process works and I’m telling you how it goes from White House staff to regular channels to the President.

O’Keefe tried once more, arguing that this failed response didn’t make sense since Biden has reported “ask[ed] a lot of questions” at briefings and “puts it to the staff to comes back to him with solutions or some answers[.]”

“That’s part of why it’s so intriguing and curious…and why we’re so desperate for information because normally…we’re told, ‘oh, well, here’s what he wanted to know and here’s who he tasked with doing it.’ And we’re not getting it this time,”He added.

The Washington Post’s Tyler Pager pressed earlier on, asking whether Biden’s “expressed concern” that it took months to respond to a crisis and how that delay “square[d]With [a] whole of government approach.”

Pager called Jean Pierre out for a word-salad. “[T]hat doesn’t answer the question about when the President was informed and whether or not he is satisfied with his staff not telling him about what has become a major problem?”

After trying to help Jean-Pierre clean up her mess on Wednesday, NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell was less charitable this time (click “expand”):

We would like to ask you to reconsider the question of who briefed President about baby formula. It is difficult to say there is a specific person when you consider the senior advisors of the president. There is a paper trail, I’m sure, about briefings to the president. There’s Domestic Policy Council. There’s a chief of staff. We need to find out who the chief of staff would talk to regarding this.

(….)

But it looks like it’s evasive to not have the most senior people in the White House willing to say, I had a conversation with the President about it, or I had — or we talked about it in this context, or that context. And we’re also all reporting on the consumer side of it of what you’re doing, putting out and trying to get information. But we’re also trying to understand the information flow of this White House and it’s important for us to get that answer, which is why we’re keep asking it until we get that answer. 

To see the relevant transcript from June 2’s briefing (including more baby formula questions from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins), click here.