“I’m just not going to comment on the question that you’re asking me,” Jean-Pierre said in response to a question from White House Correspondent Jacqui Heinrich about the Hunter Biden laptop story and Twitter’s censorship of it.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre appeared unable, or unwilling, to answer a question posed by Fox News' Jacqui Heinrich during a White House press conference on Wednesday about whether the Biden administration communicated to Twitter that the Hunter Biden laptop reporting was done from hacked materials.
"[Twitter] typically requires an official or law enforcement finding that materials were hacked in order to exercise their company policy to restrict certain stories or recordings," Heinrich said, "And the journalist who released the material noted that, in this case, around the Hunter Biden laptop story, there was no official or law enforcement finding here in the material that he was given."
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"So my question to you is, did anyone from the Biden team communicate to Twitter that this recording stemmed from hacked materials?" she asks.
Jean-Pierre, in what seems like an initial attempt to justify a non-answer, asks in response, "Are you talking about the campaign?"
Heinrich reiterates her question and the information related to the Twitter Files, adding that it was Matt Taibbi, the journalist who first published the Twitter files, who noted that the company would require a law enforcement or official finding that something was hacked.
"So [we were] wondering if it was communicated, even informally, by someone around the president, or the president's family or the campaign, that this was hacked material or could have come from hacked material, given that there was so much concern, especially after the 2018 foreign interference situation, that that could be something that we would see in that election," Heinrich explained.
Jean-Pierre was quick to try and justify not wanting to answer the question, claiming that she can't "speak to decisions made by the campaign."
"I'm covered by the Hatch Act, and so I'm just not going to comment on the question that you're asking me," she added, going on to say that it's "up to these companies to make their own decisions about the content on their platforms."
In a final deflection of the question, she reiterates that she's "just not going to comment on a decision that was made during the campaign."
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