The top White House spokesman on Tuesday steered clear of what appeared to be a major flip-flop by Vice President Joe Biden, who seemed to change his story on whether he supported for the successful raid on Osama bin Laden in 2011.
On Tuesday morning, Biden told a Washington, D.C., audience that when he and President Obama were alone, he backed the mission that ultimately led to bin Laden’s death. Biden said Tuesday he thought Obama “should go.”
But according to the The New York Times in 2012, Biden advised against it. “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go,” Biden recalled saying in January, 2012. “We have to do two more things to see if he’s there.'”
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White House spokesman Josh Earnest tap danced around the apparently contradictory comments by refusing to answer questions about it.
“I was not in the room when these decisions were being made or when the president was consulting his advisers about this very difficult foreign policy call that he made,” Earnest said in response to a question.
Biden also disputed potential 2016 Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s account, who said as secretary of state at the time she endorsed deploying a Seal team to Pakistan to raid the bin Laden compound. Instead, Biden said that during a meeting of top advisers on the eve of the raid, only then-CIA Director Leon Panetta supported going in.
For all the varying accounts swirling, it was Earnest who was left to suss out fact from revisionist history.
“[O]n many occasions, I’ve declined to provide insight into the private conversations between the president of the United States and the vice president of the United States other than to tell you that the president deeply values that advice,” Earnest punted. “But I’m not going to get into the substance of their conversations.”
“I’m telling you that I don’t have any insight to share with you about the private conversations between the president and the vice president,” he said, encouraging reporters to ask Obama and Biden themselves.
