Chris Wallace is typically a blazing disappointment from the Conservative news outlet but the reporter was caught actually doing his job during a Fox News interview with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. The spin from the White House on the border crisis has always been that it’s Trump’s fault. I expected Wallace, a never-Trumper, to support the narrative but even he couldn’t ignore reality.
“Just last week we had a pool camera providing footage to Fox News just last week into the shelters. We want to provide access into the Border Patrol facilities. We are mindful of the fact that we are in the middle of a pandemic. We want to keep these kids safe,” Psaki told “Fox News Sunday.” “We are absolutely committed to transparency and providing access to media … and we’re working to get that done as soon as we can.”
Wallace clapped back, “The only way we know how bad conditions are for some 5,000 minors in his Border Patrol facilities is because of these pictures that members of Congress have released on their own. Jen, these kids are living in these conditions now. They’re not living in these conditions some indeterminate time from now when the president says everything will be fixed, so why not allow reporters and camera crews in on a pool basis based domain safely to show the American people what’s happening in those border patrol facilities right now?”
“At this point, in allowing access to border patrol facilities for reporters, you are being less transparent than the Trump administration,” Wallace said.
Insert the blame game from Psaki. The old ‘it was Trump’s fault’:
“The Trump administration was turning away kids at the border and sending them back on the treacherous journey, or they were ripping kids from the arms of their parents. We’re not doing that. We are committed to allowing cameras into the border patrol facilities, absolutely,” Psaki said, despite a report that Biden Homeland Security officials had “muzzled” spokespersons and top agents to prevent them from speaking with the press.
White House communications director Kate Bedingfield sparred with ABC’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday over a surge in unaccompanied minors trying to cross the U.S. southern border as Bedingfield insisted the numbers “are the same kinds of surges that we’ve seen.”
“What we see from the data is that these surges are cyclical, they’re cyclical, they’re not the result of one administration’s policies or another administration’s policies, the result of, for example, weather disasters in the region. They’re the result of people fleeing poverty and violence,” Bedingfield said during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”
“We saw spikes in 2014. We saw them in 2019 when the Trump administration had perhaps the cruelest imaginable policies in place, family separation, to try to deter people from coming, and they still came. So this is a cyclical issue. Its one that President Biden has said is unacceptable to him and he’s working very quickly to address it,” she continued.
The interview clearly didn’t go as Psaki had planned and the evidence was in her deminer. The Press Sec was clearly just as surprised as the rest of us that Wallace didn’t just roll over and submit.