White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki couldn’t take the heat during a White House press briefing and snapped at reporters.
Fox New’s Peter Doocy set the tone which in turn drew follow up questions from other reporters in the room.
Initially, Doocy asked Psaki about the the Wall Street Journal report about sick researchers at the Wuhan lab in November of 2019.
“On the origins of COVID, there’s a new Wall Street Journal story that three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness of November 2019. That’s something that is apparently known to U.S. intel officials. So, why isn’t President Joe Biden pushing for more access, more information to get to the bottom of exactly what happened?”
Psaki noted that the Biden Administration has “repeatedly called for the WHO to — to support an expert-driven evaluation of the pandemic’s origins that is free from interference or politicization,” and that they were unsatisfied with the first one.
Doocy shot back stating there are over half a million dead American and it would be fair for Biden to not “wait for the WHO, we don’t know what they’re doing” and lead the effort.
Psaki asked for patience claiming they don’t have all of the information yet.
A couple of reporters later, Reuters Jeff Mason caught Psaki off guard after she lied claiming the Wall Street Journal report didn’t involve US intelligence. The Wall Street Journal report came from a fact sheet developed by the former Trump Administration.
Below is a partial transcript:
MASON: A follow-up on the China Wuhan question. Can you just give us a sense of the White House’s view of that report that The Wall Street Journal cited. Is it accurate? And is — are — do you have concerns that it may have been politicized?
PSAKI: I would say, in terms of the report, specifically about individuals being hospitalized, we have no means of confirming that or denying that. I mean, it’s not a report from the United States. What I was conveying in response to Peter’s question is that it doesn’t mean we can draw a conclusion. We don’t have enough information to draw a conclusion about the origins. There is a need to look into a range of — of options. We need data. We need an independent investigation and that’s exactly what we’ve been calling for.
MASON: I think The Journal cited a U.S. intelligence report, so that would have been a U.S. report.
PSAKI: Well, I don’t have — I don’t have anything more on a U.S. intelligence report from here.
CBS’s Weijia Jiang tried again, “So, on the COVID report, are you saying the administration did not learn about these three researchers seeking hospital care until The Wall Street Journal reported it?”
Psaki stonewalled: “I don’t have anything more on that for you.”
Note the grimaces Psaki makes while Doocy is speaking.
