Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Monday that she will remove a passage from her new book Say More that falsely claims President Joe Biden never checked his watch during a ceremony for American troops killed during the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Psaki, now an MSNBC primetime host, was spurred to act after Axios reported that her recollection that “the president looked at his watch only after the ceremony had ended” was contradicted by news reports and firsthand accounts from Gold Star families at the time.
In what Axios described as the “latest instance of current and former Biden administration officials downplaying or misrepresenting controversial episodes from the Afghanistan withdrawal,” Psaki wrote in Say More that the president’s critics had engaged in “misinformation” by blasting him over the infamous photos of him looking at his watch.
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Following the horrific attack at the Abbey Gate base that left 13 soldiers dead, Biden faced intense backlash over not only the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan but also because he appeared to be inconsiderate during the dignified transfer of the troops’ bodies at Dover Air Force Base.
While the Associated Press snapped multiple photographs of Biden looking at his watch twice throughout the ceremony, and Gold Star families spoke on the record about the president repeatedly checking the time, Psaki insisted in her book that wasn’t the case. Instead, she wrote, he only looked at the end of the transfer. Republicans were weaponizing the image, Psaki suggested, to make “him appear insensitive, concerned only about how much time had passed.”
Additionally, as Axios reported, Psaki cited the wrong fact check to bolster her case. Though quoting from a USA Today article, she claimed the Washington Post noted that Biden looked at his watch at the end of the ceremony. The article she cited, however, also concluded that “photos and video show [Biden] also checked his watch during the ceremony.”
Psaki, who now considers herself a TV journalist, initially declined to comment when Axios first published its story. After publication, though, she reached back out and told Axios that the “detail in a few lines of the book about the exact number of times he looked at his watch will be removed in future reprints and the ebook.” The White House declined to comment to Axios.
Psaki also said that the “story on Afghanistan is really about the importance of delivering feedback even when it is difficult told through my own experience of telling President Biden that his own story of loss was not well received by the families who were grieving their sons and daughters.”
Elsewhere in Say More, she stated that Biden was left speechless by the criticism he’d received from Gold Star families because he had spent ample time talking with them about the loss of his own son Beau.
Joining the left-leaning cable news network directly from the White House in 2022, Psaki soon scored her own Sunday MSNBC talk show. In late 2023, she also became the primetime lead-in to star anchor Rachel Maddow, who now only hosts on Monday nights.
A representative for MSNBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Psaki will address the removal of the book passage on her Monday evening program.
