The White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) is taking Biden's West Wing aides to task for an "inappropriate" use of logistical communication chains in the wake of Special Counsel Robert Hur's final report on the investigation of the president's mishandling of classified documents — an unusually formal rebuke of the Biden White House from the press corps responsible for covering the goings on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
In an e-mailed message from WHCA President Kelly O'Donnell, the NBC News Senior White House Correspondent called a critical letter sent to White House reporters by Counsel Office spokesman Ian Sams "misdirected."
That letter was another attempt to push reporters into reframing their coverage of Hurt's report that noted Biden's significant memory issues seen in the president's failure to recall when he was vice president and even when his son Beau died.
The Special Counsel report was ~400 pages long, meandering and confusing. That led to a lot of misreporting on its conclusions, namely that it found POTUS “willfully retained” classified docs.
— Ian Sams (@IanSams46) February 14, 2024
I sent a letter last night to the WH press corps explaining the facts: pic.twitter.com/Dd4pI9abg6
"As a non-profit organization that advocates for its members in their efforts to cover the presidency, the WHCA does not, cannot and will not serve as a repository for the government's view of what's in the news," O'Donnell wrote. "The White House has far reach to make its positions known on the Hurt report or any other matter."
Explaining that the "White House has the contact information for every bureau chief, editor and reporter covering the beat, and should reach out to them directly with any concerns about their editorial decision-making," O'Donnell noted that in its "110-year history, our association has never controlled or policed the journalism that is published or broadcast by our members or their employers."
"It is inappropriate for the White House to utilize internal pool distribution channels, primary for logistics and the rapid sharing of need-to-know information, to disseminate generalized critiques of news coverage," O'Donnell continued. "We will not distribute them going forward. The WHCA welcomes—and its members surely seek—further opportunities to ask questions of the president, the White House counsel, or the president's personal attorney on this matter."
The old political adage about explaining and losing seems to apply here. A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found 86 percent of Americans — and even 73 percent of Democrats — believe Biden is too old to be president. It's a five-alarm fire in the West Wing, so its unsurprising that Sams and the White House communication team decided to go all-out trying to change the narrative after Biden was more or less found to be some variety of non compos mentis and unable to convict of a crime that requires a willful state of mind.
What's more, it's clearly not an effective strategy for Sams and his West Wing colleagues to try scolding reporters into ignoring what was contained in the special counsel's report. Ignoring the findings about Biden's memory became even more impossible thanks to the president himself after his angry address to the nation defending his cognitive ability saw him quickly confuse the presidents of Mexico and Egypt.
The White House tried to get the White House press corps — which of course has been overwhelmingly deferent to the Biden administration — to engage in an Emperor's New Clothes defense of Biden and ignore the abundantly apparent and demonstrated decline being experienced by the president. It didn't work.