CBS hosts Errol Barnett and Lana Zak called out Karine Jean-Pierre on Thursday for lack of transparency.
The CBS News Streaming Network co-anchors hit the White House press secretary for being opaque about President Biden and his team mishandling multiple sets of classified documents.
“For a second straight day now, the White House [is] struggling to answer any questions related to classified documents discovered at locations associated with President Biden,” Barnett summarized.
He paraphrased Jean-Pierre “reading a statement, saying the president was surprised by the discovery, takes this matter very seriously, though documents were inadvertently misplaced, and he doesn’t know what is in them.”
CBS hosts criticized White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre
He then turned to his co-host and called out Jean-Pierre.
“But, Lana, we have been listening here,” he said. “She has not answered a single question, outside of a prewritten statement by the president’s lawyers.”
Zak replied that Jean-Pierre has been merely continuing “to say the same thing again and again, even in response to very simple questions about the timeline, about the specific location, clarifying questions, and continuing to use the word ‘transparent’ and saying that they did things in a transparent manner.”
U.S. President Joe Biden walks to speak to reporters as he and first lady Jill Biden leave the White House and walk to Marine One on the South Lawn on December 27, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Anna Moneymaker)
She added further, “You heard our own CBS’ Ed O’Keefe really trying to pin her down on what she means by transparency, when she’s saying she has been transparent, whether that means legal transparency, governmental transparency as required by law, or public transparency.”
After the shocking raid of former-President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence to retrieve documents over the summer, the news of Biden mishandling classified documents has caused an eruption of controversy for his administration.
Joe Biden backs his Corvette into a garage in a campaign video released Aug. 5, 2020. (Joe Biden for President)
The latest set of classified documents were found in the president’s garage in Wilmington, Delaware. The first collection were in his office at the Penn Biden Center, a Biden-aligned think tank.