Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich Presses Psaki on Leaked Biden-Ghani Call: Was the President ‘Pushing a False Narrative?’

Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich pressed White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Wednesday to say whether President Joe Biden urged his Afghan counterpart to push a “false narrative” just weeks before Afghanistan fell to the Taliban.

The revelation emerged in a transcript leaked on Tuesday of Biden’s final call with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. “There is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture,” Biden told Ghani in the July call, asking him to convey a picture that would suggest Taliban fighters were not winning control over broad swaths of Afghanistan.

“Was the president in any way pushing a false narrative in that call with the Afghan president?” Heinrich asked Psaki at Wednesday’s White House press conference.

“I think it’s pretty clear,” Psaki replied. “I’m not going to go into details of a private conversation. What we saw over the last few months was a collapse of leadership. That was happening even before Ghani left the country. What the president has conveyed repeatedly, privately and publicly, is you need to stand up and lead your country. That’s something he said in July in public form as well.”

The Taliban invaded Kabul on August 15, a little more than a month after the July 14 call. Ghani fled the country the same day in order to avoid execution.

Watch above via Fox News.