White House Partially Walks Back Its Smear Of HuffPost Journalist

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said an earlier statement “wasn’t an attempt to question the journalism” of an article about a plan for postwar Gaza.

The White House National Security Council’s chief spokesperson on Wednesday backed off the NSC’s broad attack on a HuffPost article which detailed a controversial proposal for postwar Gaza that has been circulated inside the Biden administration.

The article published Friday, written by HuffPost senior diplomatic correspondent Akbar Shahid Ahmed, revealed a potential plan to restore peace in the Middle East by brokering diplomatic ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia while funneling Saudi money toward Gaza’s reconstruction. Ahmed quoted multiple U.S. officials who described the proposal and shared doubts about its likelihood to succeed, with one official calling it “delusionally optimistic.”

But after the article gained widespread attention, the White House, which initially declined to comment, appeared to accuse Ahmed of fabricating quotes in the article: “This story is not true,” NSC spokesperson Adrienne Watson wrote in a statement on Saturday to Ahmed. “Quotes attributed to US officials are made up. It warrants no further comment.”

During Wednesday’s White House press briefing, NSC chief spokesperson John Kirby softened the administration’s attack on the article’s underlying credibility without directly retracting Watson’s statement.

“This wasn’t an attempt to question the journalism or to cast aspersions on journalistic ethics,” Kirby said in response to a question from the Wall Street Journal’s Sabrina Siddiqui (Siddiqui is a former HuffPost reporter). “I can see where some people might see that reaction and think we were trying to cast aspersions on journalistic ethics and procedure, and that was not the intent.”