CNN’s Elie Honig Rips White House’s Tantrum Over Hur Report After Being Accused of ‘Embarrassingly False Assessment’

LEFT: Ian Sams (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) RIGHT: Elie Honig

Ian Sams, the White House spokesman for oversight and investigations, lashed out at CNN’s Elie Honig on Friday, accusing him of making an “embarrassingly false assessment” of President Joe Biden’s misconduct in Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report — but both Honig and the White House Correspondents’ Association pushed back on that critique.

In a column published by New York Magazine on Friday morning, Honig argued that “Joe Biden knew he had highly classified documents in his home, kept them for a reason, and held on to them for years.”

“He arguably broke the law, and he definitely misled the American public,” added Honig in his opening paragraph.

He went on to make the case that the decision over whether to prosecute Biden or not was “a razor’s-edge call” that “reasonably could’ve gone either way.”

Here’s Honig’s explanation of the damning evidence against Biden:

Here’s the report’s biggest revelation: Biden held on to classified top-secret national-security documents after he left the vice-presidency, and he did it intentionally. This was no accident. Biden had those documents for this specific reason: He believed he had been right on American policy in Afghanistan (and that President Barack Obama had been wrong), and he wanted to paint himself as the visionary hero (and Obama as the heel) in the historical narrative. That’s why Biden shared some of their contents with his ghostwriter — though Hur acknowledges that Biden may have disclosed that classified information inadvertently, citing Biden’s “lapses in attention and vigilance.”

Here’s the single most important piece of evidence in Hur’s report: In a recording made by the ghostwriter in February 2017 — a month after Biden left the vice-presidency — Biden says he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” That, folks, is the needle-scratch moment. Up until last week, the party line has essentially been, “Hey, classified documents are strewn all around the White House, a bunch of boxes got moved around, transition is chaotic, documents end up in various places; big mistake, whoops, sorry.” Now we know that’s untrue.

Indeed, for the past year, the president and his mouthpieces have doggedly denied intentionality. Biden’s attorney declared in January 2023, as the scandal broke, that “documents were inadvertently misplaced.” Wrong. It wasn’t “inadvertent”: Biden possessed at least some of the papers knowingly and on purpose. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden did not know that classified documents were in his home or office and had no idea what they contained. False and false. Biden himself said he was “surprised to learn there were any government records that were taken there to that office” in Washington D.C. This is misdirection at best. Perhaps Biden was surprised that classified documents wound up at that specific location, but he sure as hell knew (and omitted) that he had classified documents elsewhere, at his home (“downstairs,” to be specific).

Now that Biden has been caught dissembling to the public, he has tried to pivot to the better news. In an official statement issued just after Hur’s report became public, the president proclaimed that he “cooperated completely, threw up no roadblocks, and sought no delays.” I’ll give him “cooperated” — but not “completely,” not anymore.

For laying all of this out, Honig earned the ire of Sams, who complained on X (formerly Twitter) that the column constituted “an embarrassingly false assessment by Elie Honig, amplified by [NBC reporter] Ken Dilanian, both of whom are smart and can read but apparently haven’t.”

This is an embarrassingly false assessment by Elie Honig, amplified by Ken Dilanian, both of whom are smart and can read but apparently haven’t

All these theories are raised in the report then thoroughly dissembled by facts & evidence

I laid it all out in a letter to the press: https://t.co/F35NvxTvJM pic.twitter.com/tPtjHQ1tYn

— Ian Sams (@IanSams46) February 16, 2024

Sams’s rebuke of Honig followed a letter he sent to the entirety of the White House press corps which he “express[ed] concern” over “how member organizations have reported on the recent report by Special Counsel Robert Hur,” accusing them of having “reported striking inaccuracies that misrepresent the report’s conclusion about the President.”

“Reporters in the White House Briefing Room have asked questions that include false content or are based on false premises,” complained the spokesman.

Kelly O’Donnell, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association pushed back on Sams in a statement submitting that “the February 13th letter from White House counsel spokesman, lan Sams, to the White House Correspondents’ Association is misdirected.”

“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,” she continued.

Reached for comment, Honig told Mediaite, “The White House spokesperson should read the piece and respond with substance rather than defensive bluster.”