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Karine Jean-Pierre’s Year of ‘No Comment’

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White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre holds a press briefing at the White House in Washington, D.C., May 4, 2023. (Leah Millis/Reuters)

Remembering the many times KJP has been stumped by reporters since she took over as White House press secretary.

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Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we recap Karine Jean-Pierre’s first year as White House press secretary, take a look at an “explainer” on “transphobia” in women’s swimming, and cover more media misses.

One Year of KJP

One month into Karine Jean-Pierre’s tenure as Biden’s White House press secretary, Politico wrote that her answers during briefings thus far had “baffled reporters, and even made some of her White House colleagues wince.”

“In her first 10 briefings as press secretary, Jean-Pierre said she didn’t have the information being sought 20-plus times more than predecessor Jen Psaki in her first 10 briefings, according to a review of the transcripts by West Wing Playbook,” the outlet wrote.

Jean-Pierre celebrated her one-year anniversary in her role on Saturday. The eleven months that followed that first report have hardly been much better.

The past year has been marked by countless utterances of “no comment” and “I don’t have anything for you on that right now.”

As Nate Hochman wrote of Jean-Pierre for NR in February, she is a “World-Historically Bad Press Secretary” who can often be found reading “pre-written talking points” from her notepad and offering only occasional glances at reporters.

Here she struggles to answer a question as she flips through her notes for a response:

After her first two months, the Washington Free Beacon had accumulated enough clips of Jean-Pierre refusing to answer questions to create a one-minute-twelve-second video of the press secretary knowing “a whole lot of nothing.”

Jean-Pierre has offered unfulfilling answers on a host of issues in the last year, including in June when she laughed off a question from then-CNN anchor Don Lemon about whether Biden has the stamina, physically and mentally, to continue on after 2024.

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Jean-Pierre suggested the Court made an “extreme decision to take away a constitutional right.” And in July, she falsely claimed the U.S. was “stronger economically than we have been in history.”

Jean-Pierre has written her own version of history on several occasions, including when she claimed fentanyl trafficking was at “historic lows” in March because of the “work that this president has done, because of what we’ve done specifically on fentanyl at the border.” This despite DEA administrator Anne Milgram calling fentanyl “a new, deeper, more deadly threat than we have ever seen.”

In July, Jean-Pierre failed to condemn a suggestion by an official associated with Chinese state media that Nancy Pelosi’s plane could be shot down if she tries to visit Taiwan.

And while the press briefings regularly failed to yield any real responses for reporters, Fox News noted by August that Jean-Pierre had hosted a special guest during 26 of 39 of her press briefings, seemingly in an attempt to take the focus off of her own non-answers.

Then, in August, she went weeks without holding an on-the-record press briefing.

When Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared as a special guest at a briefing in November, Jean-Pierre scolded reporters who attempted to ask Fauci questions about the origins of Covid-19.

“We have a process here. I’m not calling out on people who yell. And you’re being disrespectful to your colleagues, and you’re being disrespectful to our guest,” Jean-Pierre said. “I will not call on you if you yell, and also you’re taking time off the clock because Dr. Fauci has to leave in a couple of minutes.”

In another infamous moment, Jean-Pierre admitted that the White House has sometimes leaked information from private conversations with members of Congress. A reporter asked in January if Biden reached out to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to invite him to an event and Jean-Pierre replied, “So, as you know, we do not talk about or lay out private conversations with congressional — congressional leadership. What you —” The reporter jumped in to say, “Sometimes you do.”

Jean-Pierre then acknowledged, “Well, sometimes we do. But —”

The reporter said, “When it’s in your interests, you do,” before Jean-Pierre ultimately conceded, “All right, you may have caught me there a little bit.”

In another instance, she offered a confusing response to a question about whether the administration believes that Biden’s student-loan “forgiveness” — a plan that is currently before the Supreme Court — would be fully paid for. The total estimated cost for Biden’s one-time cancellation is $300 billion, not including the Pell-grant-recipient additional expenditure, according to a study by the Wharton School of business at the University of Pennsylvania. The cost would increase to $330 billion if the program continues over the standard ten-year window, the study showed.

“We do believe it will be fully paid because of the work this president has done with the economy,” she said.

Reporters grew especially frustrated with the press secretary over her refusal to respond to questions regarding the troves of classified documents recovered from Biden’s personal spaces.

Jean-Pierre stood in the briefing room offering zero new information to reporters day after day, citing mysterious “processes” and suggesting only the DOJ and White House counsel can respond to investigation-related queries. However, a law-enforcement official reportedly told NBC News that the DOJ has not asked the White House to refrain from speaking about the facts of the case.

More than a half-dozen White House reporters told CNN they were growing impatient with Jean-Pierre and her refusal to answer even basic questions about the investigation.

“She is arguably the least effective White House press secretary of the television era,” one veteran White House reporter told CNN, though the reporter said that did not include the Trump White House.

This is despite Jean-Pierre claiming she had been “forthcoming on the issue.”

She even snapped at a reporter who asked a question that the press secretary “should be able to answer” about whether there’s an assessment that had been planned or launched to determine if national security has been jeopardized.

“Let’s be clear. It’s not your decision to make on what I can’t and can answer from here,” the press secretary replied.

More recently, Jean-Pierre dismissed reporters’ concerns that President Biden hardly submits himself for questioning from the press. “This is a president that takes shouted questions often,” she said.

“You’re going to have an opportunity, or your colleagues are going to have an opportunity, to ask questions during the pool spray at the Oval that happens every time a head of state visits. So that is an opportunity to be able to pose a question to the president or the head of state that is visiting at the White House on that day,” she said.

The next day, Biden sat alongside Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar and laughed as the press shouted questions and White House aides asked reporters to leave.

Jean-Pierre has also taken Republicans to task on several occasions from behind the podium.

She blasted a Tennessee law banning drag performances in public venues as “not just unnecessary” but also “dangerous.” The legislation makes it illegal to host “an adult cabaret performance” in public venues or where children may be present. Cabaret performances are defined as those featuring “topless dancers, go-go dancers, exotic dancers, strippers, [and] male or female impersonators who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest.”

“Instead of doing anything to address those real issues that are impacting American people right now, you have a governor from Tennessee who has decided to go after drag shows. What sense does that make, to go after drag shows?”

​​The press secretary later added: “It’s part of a larger pattern from elected officials who espouse freedom and liberty but apparently think that freedom of speech only extends to people who agree with them.”

And just days after a 28-year-old female shooter who identified as transgender opened fire at The Covenant School, killing three children and three adults, Jean-Pierre said the transgender community is “under attack.”

“We’re seeing more and more of these hateful bills,” Jean-Pierre said. “People don’t want their freedoms to be taken. They want us to fight for their freedoms. And so it is shameful. It is disturbing. And our hearts go out to the trans community as they are under attack right now. But this is a president who has said many times before he has their backs.”

In March, she oversaw a press briefing that devolved into chaos as the stars from the Apple TV show Ted Lasso looked on.

Today News Africa correspondent Simon Ateba shouted over Jean-Pierre, demanding that she allow him to ask a question and accusing her of “making a mockery of the First Amendment.”

“It’s been seven months. You have not called on me,” he said.

“This is not China, this is not Russia,” Ateba shouted. “You are making a mockery of the First Amendment.”

Headline Fail of the Week

Last week, The Nation offered an explanation on “How Women’s Swimming Got So Transphobic.”

The story recaps the controversy over transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, who set pool, school, and Ivy League records while swimming for the women’s team at the University of Pennsylvania after three seasons of competing on the men’s team. After having been ranked 462 as a male swimmer, Thomas shot up in the women’s rankings and ultimately won the 500 freestyle at the NCAA swimming and diving championships, where the swimmer placed fifth in the 200 freestyle and eighth in the 100 freestyle. 

In The Nation’s telling, however, World Aquatics’ new transgender-participation policy that created stricter requirements for inclusion “was the culmination of a long-simmering anti-trans sentiment in the sport of women’s swimming, particularly in Western countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.”

“While most sporting bodies have taken a hard turn to the right in recent years when it comes to allowing transgender athletes — and transgender women, in particular — to compete, women’s swimming is, in some ways, uniquely anti-trans. It’s a sport whose culture created the perfect conditions for trans-exclusionary beliefs to take over, through a combination of its overwhelming whiteness, history of rampant sexual abuse, and a 40-year-old doping scandal that still haunts it,” the article continues.

It goes on to say, “Transphobia is often closely linked to white supremacy, as gender non-conformity threatens norms regarding white, Western gender ideals, and swimming’s history is decidedly anti-Black.”

The article twists in knots trying to find an explanation for the backlash other than the most obvious: Critics were concerned about the fairness of having Thomas compete in the women’s space after years of competing against men.

Media Misses

  • A tweet from civil-rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo spreading misinformation about a new Florida law has amassed more than 10 million views and 103,000 likes. The tweet from Caraballo, who is a “transgender rights” activist, claims: “Ron DeSantis just signed the ‘Let Them Die Act’ which allows medical professionals to refuse to treat patients, even if it puts their lives at risk.” However, Caraballo later noted that the “Let Them Die Act” is just “my term for the bill” adding that lawmakers “wrongfully call it the “Protections of the Medical Conscience Act.” While the law allows Florida health-care providers and payers to refuse services based on their moral, ethical, or religious beliefs, however, it does not interfere with current laws that require a practitioner to provide emergency medical treatment.
  • The Associated Press updated a story about Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s trip to Iowa over the weekend after the outlet was called out for its mischaracterization of DeSantis’s willingness to interact with voters. “DeSantis . . . made little effort to connect with voters one-on-one at a picnic fundraiser in Sioux Center as several hundred conservatives ate hamburgers,” the story initially read, this despite videos and photos from reporters at the event showing DeSantis speaking one on one with voters.
  • A New York magazine reporter who set out to “write a debunking-the-doom piece” on San Francisco ultimately penned a story that found the city to be a “wasteland” of drug abuse and homelessness. “To live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall,” Elizabeth Weil wrote.

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