Former Biden advisor Anita Dunn claims he was 'appropriately accessible to the press' during presidency

Anita Dunn, a longtime aide to former President Joe Biden, testified before the House Oversight Committee on Thursday in a closed-door interview, saying in an opening statement that Biden was "appropriately accessible to the press" during his tenure. 

Per NewsNation, Dunn, who served as senior adviser for communications for Biden, was brought in to testify about Biden’s mental acuity and his use of the autopen. Biden was notoriously not available to the press during his term in office. He held the fewest press conferences of any president since the 1980s.

In her opening statement, Dun said, "President Biden was appropriately accessible to the press. According to presidential communications scholar Martha Joynt Kumar, professor emeritus at Towson University, over his four-year term, President Biden conducted 37 press conferences as well as 151 interviews and 679 informal question-and-answer sessions with the press," per Axios reporter Alex Thompson.

"President Biden had more of these interactions with reporters than almost any other president over a four-year-term going back to Ronald Reagan."

Under Biden’s term in office, it took until October 2024 to finally appear in the White House briefing room to answer questions from the press. His first press conference as president wasn't until March of 2021. The Trump White House revealed in February that President Trump took "more than 12 times the questions in his first few hours in office as Joe Biden did in his entire first week."

UC Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project said that Biden had 37 news conferences over his four years, and 490 exchanges with reporters, defined as exchanges with reporters that typically happen "incidentally alongside some other meeting or event. These are often while the President is moving from one location to another and pauses to take questions from reporters (e.g. walking to the helicopter). Alternatively, the President may decide at the end of remarks to respond to questions from reporters." In comparison, Trump's first term had 710 exchanges with reporters, and his second term is at 124 since he took office in January.