The White House has largely avoided publicly answering questions from reporters for more than two weeks as potential legal headaches for President Joe Biden continue to mount.
Biden started August vacationing at his family home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, before briefly returning to Washington, D.C., on Monday, Aug. 7. The president did hold a public event that day, a ceremony honoring the 2022 World Series champion Houston Astros, but the White House did not hold a briefing before Biden departed for Arizona.
INFLATION COMPLICATES BIDEN’S PATH BACK TO THE WHITE HOUSE
He then traveled to New Mexico and Utah later in the week, and though the president returned to Washington, D.C., Thursday evening, the White House again chose not to hold a briefing on Friday.
The last official briefing with White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre took place on July 27, the day before Biden took an economy-focused trip to Maine.
Jean-Pierre has held two 10-15 minute gaggles aboard Air Force One over the past two-plus weeks, with one occurring on the July 28 flight to Maine and the second occurring on August 7 on the flight to Arizona.
It isn’t unusual for a president, especially one seeking reelection, to vacation and load up on travel during the summer months. However, the lack of a briefing on Friday, the same day Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that David Weiss would be elevated from lead prosecutor to special counsel overseeing federal investigations into Hunter Biden‘s tax and business affairs, is raising eyebrows.
MAGA Inc. spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, a former press aide in the Trump White House, suggested to the Washington Examiner that the Biden administration is hiding the president’s involvement in his son’s past business dealings:
“If Joe Biden never discussed business with his son, and he is mentally fit enough to serve as President, and he truly believes his policies are helping America — why won’t he take questions from reporters? Because all three of those statements from the Biden White House are lies and they know it. Contrary to the Trump White House, where the American people watched Donald Trump take questions from the press and speak directly to them every single day. Liars hide. Honest people fight for the truth.”
It’s worth noting that former President Donald Trump‘s third White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, went nearly an entire year, July 2019 to April 2020, and the entire length of her tenure in the position without holding a press briefing.
The White House declined to comment Friday about Weiss’s elevation to special counsel, but the president himself shot down a question from Fox News on Wednesday in New Mexico about recent congressional testimony from Devon Archer, a former business associate of Hunter Biden.
Archer alleged that on multiple occasions, Joe Biden sat in on business calls with his son and that Hunter Biden sold prospective business partners on the “illusion” of access to then-Vice President Joe Biden.
“I never talked business,” the president responded Wednesday when pressed about Archer’s testimony. “I knew you’d have a lousy question.”
Garland announced his decision to elevate Weiss, who had been serving as the lead prosecutor in Hunter Biden’s tax and firearms case, Friday afternoon after Weiss himself requested the restructuring.
“Upon considering his request, as well as the extraordinary circumstances relating to this matter, I have concluded that it is in the public interest to appoint him as special counsel,” he said in a statement.
The president’s son had previously entered into a plea agreement regarding his tax and gun charges, but that arrangement was thrown out at his plea hearing in July when sides could not agree on terms for future immunity. Prosecutors informed the judge that day that the younger Biden was still the subject of an ongoing investigation, potentially for violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act.
Weiss confirmed in an additional filing Friday that the federal government and Hunter Biden’s defense team “are at an impasse and are not in agreement on either a plea agreement or a diversion agreement.”
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Meanwhile, the president is also dealing with a pending legal issue stemming from his mishandling of classified documents. Joe Biden turned over dozens of documents to the Justice Department between November of 2022 and January of 2023 that had been improperly stored at his homes and offices. Some of those documents related to his time in the Obama administration, but some even dated back to his nearly four-decade-long career in the Senate.
Garland previously appointed Robert Hur to serve as special counsel overseeing that investigation. Hur and Biden’s legal team were reportedly discussing terms this week for the president to sit for an in-person interview into the matter in the near future.
