The Obama administration is trying vociferously to clean up the mess made by President Obama during his interview with Vox, in which he called the attack on the kosher deli in Paris “random.”
Earlier Tuesday, White House press secretary Josh Earnest and State Department spokesman Jen Psaki both refused to label the attack on the kosher deli as “anti-Jewish” or say that the store was attacked for a connection to Judaism as a whole.
“It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris,” Obama told Vox in an interview posted on Monday.
Earnest received pushback from three separate members of the press corps on Obama’s statement, repeatedly telling them that the individuals in the deli were “random people” and “not specifically targeted.”
“I believe the point the president was trying to make was that these individuals were not specifically targeted,” Earnest told CNN’s Jim Acosta. “They were random people that happened to randomly be in the deli and were shot.”
Not long afterwards, Psaki was taken to task by the AP’s Matt Lee, who questioned sarcastically if those shooting up the kosher deli were looking for Buddhists.
However, both tweeted soon after (41 minutes apart) that the attack was indeed one motivated by anti-Semitism.
Our view has not changed. Terror attack at Paris Kosher market was motivated by anti-Semitism. POTUS didn't intend to suggest otherwise.
— Josh Earnest (@PressSec) February 10, 2015
We have always been clear that the attack on the kosher grocery store was an anti-semitic attack that took the lives of innocent people.
— Jen Psaki (@statedeptspox) February 10, 2015
Y MT @JTSTheHill: Wasn't @presssec acknowledging the deli was targeted b/c it was Jewish with the "we know what their motivation was" part?
— Josh Earnest (@PressSec) February 10, 2015
The tweets come after multiple publications called out the president’s blunder in the wake of the two press briefings.