WATCH: Jen Psaki Circles Back With Fox’s Pete Doocy on Republicans and Defunding Police

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki went out of her way to punctuate her ongoing debate with Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy on the accusation that Republican lawmakers are the true defunders of the police.

In several exchanges this week, Doocy has sought to defend Republicans from the accusation — made most recently by senior adviser Cedric Richmond, but extending back to President Joe Biden’s campaign to defeat then-President Donald Trump — that their votes against the American Rescue Plan and other legislation containing funding for police make them guilty of “defunding the police.”

And at Friday’s briefing, Psaki circled back to the issue while responding to a tangentially-related question. Doocy questioned Psaki about Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta’s Senate testimony in July of 2020, in what he called an effort to “clarify the administration’s position here on defunding the police.”

Doocy asked if the president is “concerned” that Ms. Gupta’s testimony, when she was CEO of the Leadership Conference On Civil And Human Rights, included saying that it is “critical for state and local leaders to heed calls from Black Lives Matter and Movement for Black Lives activists to decrease police budgets.”

Psaki responded by noting that Gupta “made explicitly clear in her confirmation process that she opposes defunding the police,” and also quoted from a Fox News report on the support Gupa’s nomination received from “urrent and former police chiefs in more than 53 cities across the country, as well as the National Fraternal Order of Police.”

“I don’t know that that was your report or not, but it was certainly one from your network,” Psaki said. It was not Doocy’s report.

The Washington Post judged Gupta’s statements on the issue to be a “flip-flop,” but Biden spokesman Andrew Bates told the Post that Gupta “was speaking on behalf of her organization to reflect the consensus position among civil rights groups — not in her personal capacity — and has never personally supported defunding the police in any sense.”

It was then that Psaki circled back on her own to button up her earlier exchanges with Doocy about Republicans and defunding the police:

I’ll also note, because you’ve asked this question before — or a few times over the last several days — that when we talk about individuals in Congress and their support for funding or opposition to funding for the police, I think what the American people are most focused on is how people vote, what their record is, which is a public record.

And I will note that while the President ran on and won the most votes of any candidate in history on a platform of boosting funding for law enforcement after Republicans spent decades trying to cut the COPS program — which, again, is public record; we don’t need to under- — undervalue the intelligence of the American people — the President ran on increasing that funding. It’s in his budget.

In President Trump’s budget, he significantly cut that. So that’s a change.

And the American Rescue Plan had a great deal of funding for local and state authorities, something that can support funding for local police in communities across the country, and something many have used.

It doesn’t require me telling you names of individuals who oppose the American Rescue Plan. Every Republican opposed the American Rescue Plan, and I don’t have time to read out all their names today.

Watch above via The White House.