White House press secretary Jen Psaki appeared on actor Rob Lowe’s podcast and said President Joe Biden’s White House stage was turned into a set so events could look ‘a little bit better visually’ while he was cooped up during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She also said that some of the reporters’ questions were ‘cuckoo’ when Biden held his nearly two-hour press conference last month.
Lowe, who played White House aide Sam Seaborn in The West Wing, interviewed Psaki for nearly an hour for his Literally! podcast, with the episode debuting Thursday.
The actor was curious about the to-do surrounding the South Court Auditorium, which has been given a glow-up since Biden took office with animated backdrops, video screens and pillars.
At one point Reuters had to run a fact-check about the venue because people were claiming on social media that a ‘fake set’ had been created for Biden to receive his COVID-19 booster shot.
‘It’s just a place where you can do events, but it’s really not that exciting, it’s kind of just an auditorium,’ Psaki said.
‘But because of COVID and because the president wasn’t going to travel as much and not as many people were going to come here, he does a lot of events and actually meetings from there,’ she continued. ‘Where you can put up a bunch of people on screens and be able to see them and talk to them and engage with them in a way that you would do if he had 30 people in a meeting here.’
‘So they built it out more to make it look a little bit better visually and to ensure he could engage and see them in different boxes,’ Psaki added.
Lowe conducted the interview with Psaki last month, on the heels of Biden’s lengthy press conference, which broke the record.
She told the West Wing star it was ‘not planned.’
‘It was planned to be an hour,’ Psaki said. ‘He had a list of questioners, just so he knew who to call on. I think in the moment he just decided to take some more questions.’
Lowe wondered why they didn’t ‘declare victory and get off the field.’
‘I’m a pretty chill person, I think people who work with me would say. But I think when some of the questions started to be off in cuckoo for cocoa puffs land there, I was thinking where are we going here with this?’ Psaki replied.
‘But there were also questions that hadn’t been asked,’ she added.
For months, reporters had asked Psaki when Biden might do a formal press conference, which she told Lowe amounted to ‘an obsession.’
‘This is a very Washington thing,’ she said. ‘But he’s also taken multiple questions a day since he started the presidency. So in a funny way it was kind of people seeing what he does everyday but in a less formal setting.’
‘But yes there was a moment there where I was thinking, where is this going? Who else is going to be called on in this room?’ she admitted.
This is an excerpt from Daily Mail.
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