President Biden’s team appears to be ramping up criticism of the press following the release of the special counsel report on the president’s handling of classified documents.
White House Counsel spokesman Ian Sams wrote a letter to The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) following the release of the report and complained about the press coverage of its findings.
Sams took issue with reports that said Biden “willfully” mishandled classified documents, the Associated Press reported Wednesday. Special Counsel Robert Hur did not recommend charges against the president following a months-long investigation into Biden’s handling of classified materials.
Hur said his investigation “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.”
BIDEN, NOT SPECIAL COUNSEL HUR, BROUGHT UP SON’S DEATH IN QUESTIONING
But, Hur said that the evidence “does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Sams argued that Hur’s decision to not press charges nullified the idea that the president “willfully” retained classified material, the Associated Press reported.
“But those facts stress the importance of careful, patient coverage,” Sams wrote in the letter, according to CNN. “Instead, many outlets have reported striking inaccuracies that misrepresent the report’s conclusion about the President, and reporters in the White House Briefing Room have asked questions that include false content or are based on false premises.”
Kelly O’Donnell, the president of the WHCA, argued that the White House’s concerns should have been addressed in reaching out to specific news organizations.
“It is inappropriate for the White House to utilize internal pool distribution channels, primarily for logistics and the rapid sharing of need-to-know information, to disseminate generalized critiques of news coverage,” O’Donnell said.
Hur’s report also put a spotlight on Biden’s age and memory as the report said a jury would find him to be a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory”
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates also complained about the media coverage of the report.
Bates, reacting to a Puck News report on the press “avoiding” the topic of Biden’s age, argued that journalists have been focused on the president’s age long before the Hur report.
“Bolsters my theory that starting in 2019 some in the press began suffering from collective memory problems. Can’t remember their own coverage. Can’t remember even 1 of the historic Biden wins since then. Can’t remember that the rightwing age attacks they treat as novel are… old,” Bates wrote.
The Associated Press reported that Biden has only given 33 news conferences in his first three years, lower than any president since Ronald Reagan, and that the 86 interviews he’s given were also much lower than any other president since Reagan.
Former President Obama gave 422 interviews during the first three years of his presidency. Martha Kumar, a Towson University professor emeritus and press expert, told the AP that Biden’s news conference following the release of the Hur report “did not serve him well.”
Fox News’ Gabriel Hays contributed to this report.
