Reporters take stand against Biden official trying to dictate media coverage of special counsel report

The White House Correspondents' Association rebuked White House spokesman Ian Sams for attempting to dictate members' reporting on special counsel Robert Hur's report.

On Wednesday, Sams sent a letter to the entire White House press corps accusing them of "misrepresenting" Hur's report and reporting its "striking inaccuracies." Sams called their actions a "mistake" and attempted to re-educate reporters about the "facts."

Specifically, Sams took issue with numerous media outlets reporting exactly what Hur's report states, namely, "President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen." Sams contended that it's not true that Biden "willfully retained" classified documents because the evidence Hur uncovered showed that there could be explanations for the majority of the retained-classified documents.

Instead, Sams told reporters that Hur should have written that he "found some evidence" of willful retention.

But NBC News correspondent Kelly O'Donnell, president of the WHCA, fired back that Sams' letter and demands are "misdirected" because White House reporters will not regurgitate Biden's narrative to defend him.

"As a non-profit organization that advocates for its members in their efforts to cover the presidency, the WHCA does not, cannot and will not serve as a repository for the government’s views of what’s in the news," O'Donnell wrote in response.

Explaining the WHCA will not control its members, O'Donnell then rebuked Sams for using the WHCA's communication channels to distribute his spin.

"It is inappropriate for the White House to utilize internal pool distribution channels, primarily for logistics and the rapid sharing of need- to-know information, to disseminate generalized critiques of news coverage. We will not distribute them going forward," she promised.

Meanwhile, Hur's report has generated a bit of a reckoning among the White House press corps.

Reporter Dylan Byers conducted a survey among the White House press corps this week and found that media members now believe their coverage of Biden has neglected to reflect his aging.

"Anyone who covers this White House knows he’s showing the signs of his age—he whispers, he shuffles, he misremembers," one reporter told Byers. "Anyone with an elderly parent knows what this is."

Another reporter admitted, "The amount of time we spent talking about it versus the time we spent reporting on it was not the same. ... There should have been tougher, more scrutinizing coverage of his age earlier."

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