The White House insists that President Joe Biden was not reading from a script during his Monday morning interview on MSNBC.
A defiant Biden went on Morning Joe to reassert that he’s staying in the race for president. But some critics accused him of reading his remarks from a script during the off-camera interview, saying they could even hear papers shuffling at one point.
You can literally hear Biden fumble with the pre-written scripts his handlers gave him to read.
Not a good look, Crooked Joe! pic.twitter.com/MZtmhgVBNN
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 8, 2024
Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked directly if Biden was reading prepared remarks and said no — with one exception.
“I was in the room when the president called into Morning Joe. The president spoke from his heart, the president was very clear,” Jean-Pierre said. “There was no script at all, and he was very detailed. You heard him say, actually, during the call that he was reading some quotes. He said it, he shared that information. He was reading some quotes from the debate.”
The reporter followed up by asking about the apparent contradiction in Jean-Pierre’s answer.
“He was reading quotes, but not from a script?” she asked.
“Nope, it was not from a script,” Jean-Pierre responded.
News broke last week that two radio hosts had accepted prewritten questions from Biden’s campaign ahead of interviews with the president. One of them, WURD host Andrea Lawful-Sanders, has resigned in the wake of the controversy.
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Jean-Pierre’s response seemed to leave open the possibility that parts of Biden’s 18-minute MSNBC interview were read from prepared papers, but not all of it.
The Biden campaign is attempting to assert its staying power in the 2024 race, with the president speaking to MSNBC on the heels of a letter telling congressional Democrats to end talk of ditching him as the party’s nominee.