While all White House spokespeople tend to tell little lies or deftly dodge questions from the press they'd rather not answer, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is particularly bad at the job, as her dishonesty is often overt and she at times simply refuses to acknowledge or even pretend to dodge questions that she doesn't like.
A growing number of increasingly frustrated White House reporters have grown exceedingly tired of her blatant bloviations and dismissals of legitimate queries, and there are now calls for her to be fired and replaced by President Joe Biden, the Daily Wire's Joseph Curl reported in an op-ed.
The demand for Jean-Pierre's termination came to a head following an incident on Friday when she straight up refused to answer a series of related questions from multiple mainstream reporters about new revelations from a whistleblower about the allegations of corruption involving President Biden and his son Hunter.
On Thursday, the Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee released lightly redacted transcripts from the sworn testimony delivered by a pair of IRS whistleblowers about the Biden administration's interference in the years-long probe of Hunter Biden and the "preferential treatment" he received that wouldn't be extended to the average American citizen.
That included the delay of pertinent investigative actions like search warrants and subpoenas, the advanced divulging of planned investigative actions to Biden's attorneys, and the outright denial of certain requests for warrants and criminal charges against the president's son.
Also revealed by one of the whistleblowers, per the Conservative Brief, was a 2017 WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden to Chinese business associate and Communist Party official Henry Zhao -- obtained in 2020 via an IRS search warrant -- that threatened Zhao and made multiple references to Joe Biden and potential consequences for not following through on a prior deal.
The message from Hunter to Zhao reportedly stated: "I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
The next day, during Friday's press briefing, Newsmax reporter James Rosen first pressed White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby on the matter and, after reading that text message verbatim, asked directly, "Does this not undermine the President’s claim during the 2020 campaign ... that he never once discussed his son’s overseas business dealings with him?"
Kirby refused to answer the question and, following a terse back-and-forth with Rosen, abruptly exited the briefing early, leaving Jean-Pierre to handle the fallout.
The Daily Wire noted that, to the surprise of some, the topic of Hunter Biden resurfaced a short time later when several reporters from mainstream outlets picked up on Rosen's line of questioning and pressed that matter along with other questionable aspects in regard to the president's son.
That included Peter Baker of The New York Times, who asked about the optics of Hunter being a guest at a White House State Dinner event just two days after he pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges related to tax violations and a gun crime, as well as the WhatsApp message.
Baker was followed by Steven Nelson of the New York Post, after which Rosen re-entered the fray to pose his initial question to Jean-Pierre. Much to her dismay and increasing frustration, though, similar questions were then posed by Weijia Jiang of CBS News and Monica Alba of NBC News.
The Daily Wire noted that, in response to that flurry of questions about Hunter Biden, Jean-Pierre either straight up refused to provide an answer -- often diverting the questions to the notoriously closed-lipped Justice Department and White House Counsel's office -- or simply danced around the queries with non-answers or snarky retorts, after which the press briefing then moved on to other issues.
"And there you have it. The White House will not be held to account by the Fourth Estate charged with holding the powerful to account," the Daily Wire's Curl concluded. "Time to fire Karine Jean-Pierre."
