MSNBC host Jen Psaki has sparked outrage among Gold Star families with her dismissive remarks on President Biden's watch-checking during a solemn 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."
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Psaki, who preceded Karine Jean-Pierre as White House press secretary, garnered 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 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."
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."
Nikoui notoriously heckled Biden during this year's State of the Union address. The incident put him in legal crosshairs for disrupting Congress, but D.C. Attorney Gen. Brian Schwalb later decided not to press charges.
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Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who joined the Gold Star fathers to speak to Hannity, said Psaki's controversy reminded Americans of the botched withdrawal that spelled military and diplomatic doom for the U.S.
"We're still trying to get some of our SIVs out of Afghanistan. We're still trying to get justice for the Gold Star families. All of that three and a half years into this administration," he said.
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.
Schmitz, who was also present at the ceremony for the 13 fallen U.S. service members in 2021, said he witnessed Biden check his watch for at least the first four caskets that came off the aircraft.
"I couldn't look at him after that," he explained.
Schmitz slammed the new book as "politically motivated" and written for financial gain. He also called on MSNBC and Simon & Schuster, the book's publisher, to push Psaki to resign over the watch-checking claim and said he plans to speak to an attorney about "taking this to the next level."
Fox News' Brian Flood contributed to this report.
