President Joe Biden’s lack of message discipline has created multiple headaches for the White House communications shop, and his calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” this week is no exception.
When Biden privately apologized to former President Barack Obama in 2012 for publicly supporting gay marriage before him, White House aides conveyed that Obama had accepted Biden’s regrets because he knew his deputy was speaking from the heart.
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White House press secretary Jen Psaki also referenced Biden’s heart this week when the president doubled back after an East Room event to tell reporters he thought Putin “is a war criminal.”
“The president’s remarks speak for themselves,” she said. “He was speaking from his heart and speaking from what he’s seen on television, which is barbaric actions by a brutal dictator through his invasion of a foreign country.”
“There is a legal process that continues to be underway at the State Department,” she added. “That’s a process that they would have any updates on.”
Biden’s unofficial designation preceded Secretary of State Antony Blinken declaring Thursday that “intentionally targeting civilians is a war crime.”
“Yesterday, President Biden said war crimes have been committed in Ukraine,” Blinken said. “Personally, I agree.”
Here are three other times White House staff have had to mop up after Biden either got ahead of administration policy or misstated it.
Biden describes immigration situation at southern border as ‘crisis’
After months of White House aides and administration officials avoiding using the phrases “southern border” and “crisis” in the same sentence, Biden did just that after a round of golf last spring near his Delaware home.
“We’re going to increase the numbers,” he said. “The problem was that the refugee part was working on the crisis that ended up on the border with young people, and we couldn’t do two things at once. And now, we’re going to increase the numbers.”
That week, Psaki repeated that Biden did not consider “children coming to our border seeking refuge from violence, economic hardships, and other dire circumstances” to be “a crisis.”
“He does feel that the crisis in Central America, the dire circumstances that many are fleeing from, that that is a situation we need to spend our time or effort on, and we need to address it if we’re going to prevent more of an influx of migrants from coming in years to come,” she said.
Biden was similarly cavalier with his words last summer when he threatened to “not sign” the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal if it arrived on his desk without the stalled $2 trillion social welfare and climate proposal.
The president did end up signing the infrastructure bill into law, however. The bigger spending measure favored by liberals, recently rebranded from “Build Back Better” to “Building a Better America,” is still stalled.
Biden says people who defy House Jan. 6 committee subpoenas should be prosecuted
Despite promising that his Justice Department would be independent, Biden expressed hope last fall that allies of former President Donald Trump would be held “accountable criminally” for defying congressional subpoenas issued by the House Jan. 6 select committee.
Psaki insisted that Biden believed the Justice Department “has the purview and the independence to make decisions about prosecutions.”
“That is also how he has operated, how he has governed, and how he will continue to govern,” she said. “That’s what’s important for people to watch.”
When pressed on Biden’s past complaints that Trump had transformed the Justice Department into a team of personal lawyers, Psaki claimed that Trump “used his office to incite an insurrection.”
“He put political pressure on senior DOJ officials to propagate lies about the election to the point where they threatened to resign en masse,” she said. “There’s hardly a comparison there.”
Biden pledges US would come to Taiwan’s defense if attacked by China
After China tested a hypersonic missile last year, Biden was pushed during a televised town hall on whether the United States would “vow to protect Taiwan.”
“So are you saying that the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense if China attacked?” the host asked.
“Yes — Yes, we have a commitment to do that,” the president replied.
The next day, Psaki reiterated that the U.S.-Taiwan relationship was underpinned by the Taiwan Relations Act and that Biden “was not announcing any change in our policy nor has he made a decision to change our policy.”
“Some of the principles of the Taiwan Relations Act that the United States will continue to abide by, of course, is assisting Taiwan in maintaining a sufficient self-defense capability,” she said. “Another principle is that the United States would regard any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific and of grave concern to the United States.”
During the same town hall, Biden indicated that he was prepared to deploy the National Guard to drive trucks if it helped ease snarled supply chains.
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“Requesting the use of the National Guard at the state level is under the purview of governors, and we are not actively pursuing the use of the National Guard on a federal level,” a White House staffer later clarified.
