Maybe she should have said less.
Biden press secretary-turned-MSNBC host Jen Psaki is out with a new book titled Say More, and she is already being forced to walk back a false claim she included about her former boss.
On Tuesday’s show, Megyn was joined by the hosts of Ruthless – Josh Holmes, Comfortably Smug, Michael Duncan, and John Ashbrook – to discuss Psaki’s lie and why Psaki did it.
Psaki Gets Fact-Checked
As Axios first reported, Psaki claims in her book out this month that President Joe Biden did not look at his watch during the August 2021 dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force Base for the 13 U.S. service members killed during the botched Afghanistan withdrawal.
The former White House press secretary apparently writes in the book that “the president looked at his watch only after the ceremony had ended.” And according to Axios, she then accuses those who were critical of him of engaging in “misinformation” and writes that they tried to use the moment to make Biden “appear insensitive, concerned only about how much time had passed.”
The problem? Gold Star families, photos, videos, and fact checkers have long-confirmed he did, in fact, check his watch. “The title of the book is Say More: Lessons from Work, the White House, and the World,” Megyn said. “And I guess her lessons are: When something bad happens, you just lie about it. And that makes perfect sense given that she was Biden’s press secretary and now she works for MSNBC.”
The Attempted Clean Up
While Psaki admitted to Axios that the “detail in a few lines of the book about the exact number of times he looked at his watch will be removed in future reprints and the ebook,” she did not admit to her lie.
Instead, she told Axios: “The story on Afghanistan is really about the importance of delivering feedback even when it is difficult told through my own experience of telling President Biden that his own story of loss was not well received by the families who were grieving their sons and daughters.”
What makes the error particularly egregious, in Megyn’s view, is how Psaki seemingly thumbs her nose at the Gold Star families who have been critical of the president. “She is looking those Gold Star families in the face and saying, ‘You lied. You put out misinformation to hurt our dear president. I’m the only one who will tell you the truth,'” she explained. “She put it in her book, which she then read in audio form.”
Her publisher, however, has been more forthcoming. A representative for Scribner confirmed to The New York Post that the offending text “will be corrected in the e-book and future printings, due to inaccuracies as originally written.”
Pot, Meet Kettle
The debacle comes on the heels of the controversy surrounding South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s new memoir in which she erroneously wrote about meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un – something Psaki was critical of during her appearance on The View last week.
PSAKI: I’ve also never worked for somebody who’s lied about a foreign leader they’ve met with. And Alyssa [Farah] made this point. This is so true. Meeting with Kim Jong Un – there are a handful of people who have ever done this. It’s very knowable…
I just wrote a book… You read the book 1,000 times. You read it out loud. When you’re doing the audio book, you think, ‘oh, you need a comma there’ or ‘that word is strange.’ When she said, ‘And I met with Kim Jong Un,’ did she think to herself, ‘I didn’t meet with Kim Jong Un’?
As Megyn sees it, Noem’s inaccuracies pale in comparison. “This is the same person who, a week ago, was out there lambasting Kristi Noem for lying in her new book,” Megyn noted. “She lied about a dumbass meeting with a world leader… It is dumb to tell, but it has no consequence,” she said. “[Psaki’s lie] is a middle finger to the Gold Star families, and there has been no apology.”
Ultimately, Megyn said there is but one thing to deduce from the incident. “I think she is a liar,” she concluded. “She can’t apologize because this is intentional… She knew perfectly well and she decided to take a hit because she is running cover for [Biden].”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Ruthless by tuning in to episode 791 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.