A reporter just told White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, to her face, that she is not “fit” for her job.
The whole thing was caught on camera and posted to Twitter on Tuesday by The Post Millennial. Take a look:
Reporter @simonateba tells WH press sec she’s not fit for her job after she repeatedly fails to address Biden’s classified doc debacle pic.twitter.com/scKHYsxTzw
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) January 24, 2023
Background
Jean-Pierre has never shown herself to be a great White House press secretary – if anything, she has shown the contrary. But, recently, Jean-Pierre has been receiving even more criticism than usual for her handling of the classified documents scandal involving President Joe Biden.
It happened again during the press conference captured in the above video.
There, Jean-Pierre was pressed by several reporters, including Fox News’s Peter Doocy, about numerous aspects of the classified documents scandal that remain unclear. Jean-Pierre, however, was unable to answer the questions. In fact, she refused to answer them, directing reporters to the White House counsel’s office.
Not “fit”
Jean-Pierre’s refusal to answer questions frustrated many reporters. And, no one did it seem to frustrate more than reporter Simon Ateba.
In the above video, a frustrated Ateba, says, “Karine, since you don’t have any answer on the classified documents, you don’t seem a good fit for this job. We do not seem to have any answer from you.”
Jean-Pierre just ignores him, and she moves on to another reporter. According to The Post Millennial, however, Ateba was far from the only frustrated reporter in the room.
The outlet quotes another reporter as saying, “I’d just like to re-up the request from colleagues in this room for someone to answer these questions from the podium.”
That’s embarrassing
This is not the first time that Jean-Pierre has faced such criticism – far from it. Fox News contributor Joe Concha recently argued:
Karine Jean-Pierre has shown that she is not qualified for this job at this level. We’ve seen that now over the last couple of months, because she keeps saying over and over again — as if she’s almost programmed, like she has no ability to think extemporaneously — that the president ‘takes these documents very seriously.’
One of Jean-Pierre’s predecessors, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders – the White House press secretary of the Trump administration – recently cut Jean-Pierre some slack, noting that she “has a terrible story to tell.”
Sanders, however, also said, “It’s hard to know whether [Jean-Pierre] either just doesn’t get it because she’s not being given the information or she just doesn’t know how to communicate effectively.”
Sanders said that this is a question that she would leave to Jean-Pierre to answer.
