‘I Actually Disagree With You’: Biden Spox Jean-Pierre Cuts Off Fox Reporter’s Question on Debt Relief

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre interrupted Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich to argue with the premise of a question about President Joe Biden‘s student loan cancellation.

At Tuesday’s press briefing, Jean-Pierre was accompanied by White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha, who spoke about the continuing serious threat the virus poses while supporting the president’s assertion that the pandemic phase is over.

Heinrich began her exchange with Jean-Pierre by questioning the basis, under the HEROES Act, for the president’s student loan cancellation. Jean-Pierre, in her lengthy response, blasted the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic and cited Dr. Jha’s comments in defending the program as a way to give relief
to people “who are really squeezed by the pandemic.”

When Heinrich tried to follow up by asking about the legal challenges to the program, JEan-Pierre cut her off to dispute the premise of those challenges as merely a pretext to deny “middle-class families a little bit more breathing room”:

JACQUI HEINRICH: I hear what you’re saying on all that. I guess my question is: Is there another — perhaps a better mechanism to do that, because the whole program is caught up now in litigation. I know a lot of this legal argument is that it can’t be a national emergency because of actions that the administration has taken elsewhere.

So I wonder —

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: So I actually disagree with you. What is happening is there are opponents out there of the student loan debt relief who do not want to give middle-class families a little bit more breathing room.

There are opponents out there, many of them are Republicans, who are — who do not want us to make sure that those 90 percent of Americans who are making $75,000 or less are getting that actual benefit to be able to put money down on a house, to be able to start a family. They are upset that we are trying to help those very, very Americans. So that is what is happening.

This is pure politics that we’re seeing out there. It is not — and the President — the way the President sees this, this is not partisan.

Watch the full exchange above via C-SPAN.

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