Newsmax Reporter Draws Laughs at Briefing By Taking ‘One More Stab’ At Getting Comments on Trump Case

Newsmax White House correspondent James Rosen drew laughs when he told Biden NSC Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby he wanted to take “one more stab at getting you to say something substantive about the Trump case.”

Since news of Trump’s indictment on 37 counts for violating the Espionage Act broke, President Joe Biden and his administration have been strict in saying as little as possible in response to the inevitable barrages of questions. But that hasn’t stopped reporters from throwing a kitchen sink’s worth of new and novel premises against the wall to try and force an answer.

Kirby joined White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre at Monday’s press briefing, during which several reporters took cracks at jarring loose a quote with some new or novel premise.

Among them was Rosen, who made Kirby laugh by simultaneously commenting on the ongoing exercise and building on it in an exchange that included some weird banter about satisfaction and thrusting:

JAMES ROSEN: Thank you, Karine. And thank you, Admiral. I should like first to take one more stab at getting you to say something substantive about the Trump case.

MR. KIRBY: Go for it. (Laughter.)

JAMES ROSEN: And then —

MR. KIRBY: I will be just as unsatisfying to you — (laughter) — as I have been to everybody else today.

JAMES ROSEN: That’s so prejudicial.

MR. KIRBY: But I also want to be — I got Mauritius up here — (holds up a page from the briefing book) — and nobody asked me. (Laughter.) Nobody. And I was ready today. (Laughter.)

JAMES ROSEN: That’s — that is not —

MS. JEAN-PIERRE: I know he’s not (inaudible).

JAMES ROSEN: — the subject of my — of my second thrust. But first on the Trump case, and then I want to ask about Americans detained in foreign countries.

President Biden, in a speech that was an official speech and not a campaign speech last year in Philadelphia, identified Donald Trump and his supporters as threats to the American homeland. And you amplified those comments in one of your Zoom briefings that you held not long thereafter.

Does the enrollment of Donald Trump in the American criminal justice system as a defendant, which necessarily entails certain restrictions on his movements and so on, provide for the American people some reassurance that he is less of a threat than he was when the President made those remarks?

MR. KIRBY: James, I’m just not in a position to speak to that one way or the other.

Alas, Rosen’s was not the last stab, and further thrusting was equally unsatisfying.

Watch above via The White House.

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