WATCH: Jen Psaki Says Biden Wasn’t Calling Out Manchin and Sinema, He Was Calling Out Cable Pundits

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki tried to defuse remarks by President Joe Biden that were widely seen as a call-out of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

During his speech in Tulsa Tuesday, the president talked about legislative action on voting rights, including this passage that made waves:

I hear all the folks on TV saying, “Why doesn’t Biden get this done?” Well, because Biden only has a majority of, effectively, four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.

The comments were interpreted by most people as a reference to Manchin’s and Sinema’s opposition to ending the filibuster, but at Wednesday’s White House briefing, Psaki told reporters that was not the case.

Psaki was asked about the president’s remark, and the fact that Manchin and Sinema have voted with Democrats “100 percent of the time on major votes.”

Psaki began with some praise, saying that Manchin and Sinema “would call out their own independent streaks. That is something I think they both proud of. They both vote for and represent the people in the states, and all of the people who elected them to represent them, in the Senate.”

She then parsed Biden’s statement, saying “Look at what the president said, the big tell here is ‘I hear all the folks on TV saying…’ Now as a former TV pundit myself, I can tell you that sometimes these conversations can be oversimplified. TV isn’t always made for complex conversations about policymaking.”

When the reporter followed up, Psaki read out Biden’s comments once more, and said: “He was not giving a specific commentary on a policy, he was conveying again that sometimes that’s the summary, shorthand version that he sees on cable news at times.”

She went on to say that President Biden’s position on the filibuster has not changed.

Watch above via C-Span.