A frustrated White House press corps finally gets to question Biden

A frustrated White House press corps finally gets to question Biden

For weeks, the White House press corps has been boiling – and not from the Washington, DC, heat. They’re frustrated. Some feel the White House misled the press before President Joe Biden’s stumbling performance at last month’s CNN presidential debate. Others have been exasperated by the White House’s response since then to questions about the president’s health, often leading to follow-ups and clarifications from the administration on otherwise straightforward questions. And nearly all of the White House correspondents who spoke to CNN for this report felt the president should have held a press conference with reporters in the immediate aftermath of the debate. Now, two weeks after Biden’s eye-opening debate performance, journalists from the nation’s biggest news outlets will finally get their chance to question the president directly when Biden takes questions Thursday evening during the NATO summit. Expect fireworks. Since the debate, the journalists tasked with covering the White House have been imploring the president’s communications team – who said the debate was just a “bad night” – to prove it, allowing him to take questions directly from the press. “This is a period of time here where the public is trying to understand what happened,” NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell said on July 2. “And the president could help to answer that by engaging with us in an unscripted way right now.”