Reporter confronts KJP with perfect question after Biden suggests cannibals ate his uncle — and her response says it all

Reporters aren't buying the excuse that White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre offered for President Joe Biden's latest gaffe.

On Wednesday, Biden visited the Veteran's War Memorial in Scranton, Pennsylvania, one of the locations where his uncle, World War II veteran Ambrose J. Finnegan Jr., is memorialized.

Afterward, Biden spoke about his uncle, whose body was never recovered after a plane crash in the Pacific Ocean. He said:

Ambrose Finnegan — we called him “Uncle Bosie” — he was shot down. He was Army Air Corps before there was an Air Force. He flew single-engine planes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea. He had volunteered because someone couldn’t make it. He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time.They never recovered his body. But the government went back, when I went down there, and they checked and found some parts of the plane and the like.

Biden's story, however, is mostly untrue.

The plane on which Biden's uncle was flying on May 14, 1944, wasn't shot down, nor was he the victim of cannibals. According to the Pentagon, both engines in the plane failed, which caused a crash landing into the ocean. Of the four people on the plane, only one survived; the other three were never recovered.

On Thursday, reporters asked Jean-Pierre if she had a "cannibal tab" in her press binder.

At first, she acted as if she didn't know what the press was asking about — she said, "There is no 'cannibal' tab. What are you talking about?" — before addressing the incident.

But then she refused to address directly the fact that what Biden said is not true. She softened the blow by noting that Biden is "incredibly proud" of his uncle, and visiting the memorial was "incredibly emotional and important to him." And, of course, she implicitly slammed Donald Trump, referring to comments the former president allegedly made about veterans who die in war.

"As he reiterated, the last thing American veterans are are 'suckers' or 'losers,' and he wanted to make that clear," Jean-Pierre said.

"By embellishing the story?" a reporter fired back.

"Look, I don't have anything beyond what I just laid out," Jean-Pierre responded, never answering the question.

And with that, the seven-minute press gaggle aboard Air Force One concluded.

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