White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki is explaining why President Joe Biden said he has been to the border when reporters have failed to find evidence of a prolonged visit.
During a press briefing on Friday, Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked, “Why did President Biden say he has been to the border?”
“As you may have seen, there’s been reporting that he did drive through the border when he was on the campaign trail in 2008,” Psaki responded. “And he is certainly familiar with the fact, and it stuck with him, with the fact that in El Paso the border goes right through the center of town.”
She continued, “But what the most important thing everyone should know and understand is that the president has worked on these issues throughout his entire career and is well versed in every aspect of our immigration system, including the border. That includes when he was vice president, and he went to Mexico and Central America ten times to address border issues and talk about what we can do to reduce the number of migrants who are coming to the border.”
“He does not need a visit to the border to know what a mess was left by the last administration. That’s his view,” Psaki added.
Watch the video below:
DOOCY: "Why did President Biden say he has been to the border?"
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) October 22, 2021
Psaki: "There's been reporting that he did drive through the border when he was on the campaign trail in 2008." pic.twitter.com/pMPtyxCNUE
During a CNN town hall event on Thursday, Biden said, “I’ve been there before, and I haven’t — I mean, I know it well. I guess I should go down. But the whole point of it is I haven’t had a whole hell of a lot of time to get down.”
However, The Washington Post’s fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, noted that the paper “cannot find evidence that Biden at one point made a visit to the southern border.”
“After digging some more, we discovered that Biden briefly drove past the border while on a campaign swing in 2008,” Kessler wrote on Friday.
He added, “Whether the president has ever visited the border — or will — is a bit of a gotcha question. Given the level of briefings a president receives, a visit may not necessarily add to his body of knowledge. The Biden White House has certainly taken pains to not suggest the border surge is a crisis — which a presidential visit would suggest.”
Finally, Kessler said, “But the president was asked a question about when he would visit the border, and he responded that he has ‘been there before.’ It turns out it was a brief drive-by — not the kind of sustained visit that his critics are demanding. It’s almost like counting a refueling stop as a visit to a country.”