Joe Biden announced that Obama administration alumna Jen Psaki would be his press secretary, bypassing his devoted campaign spokesperson and surrogate, Symone Sanders.
Sanders would be “Senior Advisor and Chief Spokesperson for the Vice President,” the campaign said in an announcement.
Sanders stood by Biden’s side through thick and thin, including the dark days after the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, when he placed fourth and fifth, respectively. At one point, with the campaign unable to afford security, Sanders tackled a protester onstage herself:
Sanders also fielded questions from reporters in the spin room after primary debates, which Biden never did himself.
Psaki served in several posts in the Obama administration, including Deputy White House Press Secretary, and spokesperson for the State Department.
In the latter capacity, Psaki fielded questions from the press in 2014 about Hunter Biden’s new job as a board member of the Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, while his father was in charge of diplomacy with Ukraine. Psaki told reporters, falsely, that there were no concerns within the State Department about the appearance of a conflict of interest for then-Vice President Joe Biden.
Psaki also led the Obama administration’s hapless “hashtag diplomacy,” which involved tweeting support for Ukraine on social media rather than sending the besieged country weapons with which to defend itself against invasion by Russia.
Earlier, Psaki had worked for Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, and was involved in a hoax about the death of a steelworker’s wife, as Breitbart News noted in 2015:
Her most famous episode involved a brazen lie about Joe Soptic, a steelworker whose wife developed cancer and died after he was laid off from a company that had been bought by Bain Capital. Both the Obama campaign and Obama’s “super PAC” blamed Republican rival Mitt Romney for Soptic’s wife’s death. Psaki claimed, falsely, that the campaign had not known about the (false) super PAC ad.
The Biden campaign announced other press appointments, proudly proclaiming: “For the first time in history, these communications roles will be filled entirely by women.” However, as current White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany pointed out, all current senior White House communications roles are also filled by women.
Other picks include Karine Jean-Pierre, an anti-Israel radical who formerly worked for the George Soros-funded MoveOn.org. Biden named her “Principal Deputy Press Secretary.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.