Former White House press secretary and current MSNBC host Jen Psaki could face a subpoena from the House Foreign Affairs Committee over a false claim she made about President Joe Biden in her book.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) is considering issuing Psaki a subpoena if she does not schedule an interview with the committee for its investigation into the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to a letter confirmed to the Washington Examiner by the committee’s spokesperson. This renewed call comes after Psaki included a falsehood in her book about Biden’s behavior at a ceremony for U.S. soldiers killed during the withdrawal.
“As a private citizen, willing and able to publish a memoir on her tenure as White House Press Secretary, I encourage Ms. Psaki to refrain from relying on thin legal arguments to dodge her responsibility to appear before Congress,” McCaul wrote to Psaki’s lawyer Emily Loeb on Tuesday.
“The Committee will not tolerate Ms. Psaki’s continued obstruction of its critical investigation,” McCaul said.
In her book, Psaki noted Biden did not look at his watch during the ceremony for soldiers. However, photographs from the Associated Press show he looked at his watch. Psaki said she would remove those lines from the book.
“[A] detail in a few lines of the book about the exact number of times he looked at his watch will be removed in future reprints and the ebook,” Psaki said in a statement regarding the falsehood.
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The committee tried to interview Psaki last September, but Psaki, who was working in the White House at the time, deferred to the White House counsel, which refused.
“It is troubling that Ms. Psaki seeks to profit off the Afghanistan tragedy, and has felt comfortable writing accounts and making them available to the general public, but refuses to make herself available to Congress,” McCaul’s letter said.
