During an interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition” on Thursday, incoming White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said she “can’t get ahead of” how any national security leaks during the Biden administration will be handled and whether the Biden administration will investigate and track journalists the same way the Obama administration did “will be questions” for the nominee for attorney general.
Host Steve Inskeep asked, “President Obama’s administration aggressively prosecuted leakers of classified information and that spilled over into investigating journalists, obtaining journalists’ phone records, tracking their comings and goings from government agencies. Does this administration mean to do the same?”
Psaki responded, “[O]bviously, there are different circumstances, as you well know, that came up during the Obama administration, and a number of those were overseen by the Department of Justice at the time. President-Elect Biden has not even selected an attorney general yet. Believe me, people want to know who it’s going to be. But one of his priorities is returning that department to an independent department, one that does not have political influence from the White House, which will be quite a sea change from our current circumstance. And I suspect those will be questions that a future nominee for that role will be asked in a confirmation hearing.”
Inskeep characterized Psaki’s response as an “elegant evasion of the question.”
Psaki then stated that she hopes there aren’t any national security leaks, but she “can’t get ahead of what that would look like, and certainly not on behalf of any future Department of Justice.”
(h/t Stephen L. Miller)
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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