MSNBC host gushes over Biden spox who spent years saying he was fit as a fiddle

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell lauded former White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s performance in the role Wednesday, claiming she embodied “sanity,” despite efforts to conceal the failing health of then-President Joe Biden.

A Wall Street Journal article published on Dec. 19 revealed White House aides “insulated” Biden, even from Cabinet members, as his health declined, months after similar articles published by the outlet earlier in the year generated pushback from some media outlets. O’Donnell claimed that unlike Psaki, White House press secretaries in the Trump administration told “obvious lies.”

“That is the way every White House press secretary not hired by Donald Trump has always talked about the Federal Reserve carefully and respectfully,” O’Donnell claimed. “When Jen Psaki stepped up to the podium in the White House press briefing room for that very first time, I was watching and I knew very quickly that I was watching the best White House press secretary I had ever seen. And when each of Donald Trump’s White House press secretaries made their rare appearances in the White House press briefing room, I knew I was watching the worst press secretaries in the history of that job, including the current holder of that job.”

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“I was a writer and executive producer of NBC’s Emmy-winning drama set in the White House called ‘The West Wing,’ and if anyone in the writers’ room there ever suggested that we send the press secretary into our White House press briefing room that we had on the Warner Bros. Lot in Burbank, and have her just tell obvious lies from start to finish to the press, I would have been among the first to say that that would never happen,” O’Donnell continued. “It would so never happen. No one in the ‘West Wing’ writers’ room would never even suggest it.”

Psaki claimed in May 2021 that it was hard to keep up with Biden after questions emerged about his health following multiple falls on a staircase used to board Air Force One. Psaki also claimed in a 2024 book that Biden did not check his watch while at a ceremony for military personnel killed in an August 2021 bombing in Kabul, which she was forced to retract after criticism from families of the military personnel.

Questions were raised about the White House’s truthfulness about Biden’s health during his term in office. On multiple occasions, Biden said he spoke with people who had died, including claiming to have spoken with former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017, and former French President Francois Mitterrand, who passed away in 1996 on two occasions in February 2024.

In September 2022, Biden asked for Republican Rep. Jackie Walorski of Indiana at a conference on hunger that took place several weeks after Walorski and two staffers were killed in a car accident.

Biden also suffered multiple falls during his term in office, including one at the Air Force Academy in June 2023, a fall while on his bike in June 2022 in addition to the times Biden tripped on the steps of Air Force One. Biden started using a different set of stairs onto the VC-25, a modified Boeing 747 used as Air Force One, among other concessions to his age in the later years of his administration.

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