Gold Star families are expressing their outrage with former White House press secretary Jen Psaki‘s dismissive comments on President Biden's watch-checking during a ceremony for U.S. service members killed during the catastrophic Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021.
“Jen ‘Circle Back' Psaki is just a vile, shameless human being,” Darin Hoover, father of late SSgt. Darin Taylor Hoover, who was killed in the Kabul airport bombing, told Fox News' Sean Hannity on Monday.
“[She's] trying to make money off of our kids' backs and rewrite history and establish those lies for the Biden administration on their failures, their catastrophic failures. It's been nothing but lies all along.”
Psaki caught attention by claiming in her new book, “Say More,” that Biden never checked his watch during the ceremony honoring the slain heroes. A report by Axios, however, said Psaki's retelling contradicted pictures and Gold Star families' firsthand accounts.
Psaki, following the online backlash, told Axios “the detail in a few lines of the book about the exact number of times he looked at his watch will be removed in future reprints and the eBook.” (RELATED: Psaki Edits Book After Misleading Biden Claim)
The soon-to-be removed version of Psaki's book claimed “the president looked at his watch only after the ceremony had ended,” and the MSNBC star insisted Biden's critics misrepresented the facts to make Biden appear insensitive. However, Gold Star families have long said they saw Biden check his watch multiple times during the dignified transfer ceremony.
Gold Star father Steve Nikoui, father of Marine Lance Corporal Kareem Nikoui, also weighed in on Hannity's show Monday.
“It's devastating, but it's not really surprising from this administration and from the people that have worked in it,” he said.
“[The Biden administration] continue[s] to lie to, manipulate facts and change the narrative to support their narratives and to try to change the history, regardless of what mishaps they've done.”
The conversation carried into Tuesday morning when Gold Star father Mark Schmitz joined “Fox & Friends” to respond.
“The wounds had been reopened yet again by this talking puppet who had no idea what she was talking about,” he said of Psaki.
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