BIDEN TAKES A NEWS DUMP: Reporter Blasts WH for Dropping Report ’10 Minutes’ Before Briefing [WATCH]
The White House press room was not happy.
During Thursday’s White House press briefing, CBS correspondent Ed O’Keefe blasted the Biden Administration for dropping its Afghanistan withdrawal report “10 minutes before the briefing began.”
“I think I speak on behalf of my colleagues in this room when we want the record to reflect,” O’Keefe said. “This was sent to us about 10 minutes before the briefing began, with little notice, and it’s the very definition of a modern major holiday news dump. You’re releasing this at the beginning of the high holidays, and after months of requests from Republicans and the broader public. So, why today, and is this all we get? Is this a response to the studies that were done by the agencies, or is this considered a summary of it?”
“This is the result of months and months of work by individual agencies who were participating in the withdrawal to voluntarily review that withdrawal, which they did, and they worked through that,” Kirby replied. “These documents are classified, and we felt it was the responsible thing to do, after those reviews were done, to then run a process across the administration, to take a look at those reviews ourselves, across the interagency, work our way through it and then provide them to the relevant committees and leaders on the Hill, which we did today.”
“No effort here to try to obfuscate or try to bury something,” Kirby continued. “It’s an effort to try to be as open, as transparent as we can.”
