![White House spokesman Ian Sams lashed out at CNN's senior legal analyst Elie Honig on Friday after Honig slammed the White House's response to the Hur report. [Screenshot CNN]](https://images.dailycaller.com/image/width=960,height=411,fit=cover,f=auto/https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screenshot-2024-02-16-at-2.33.32-PM-e1708112097145.png "White House spokesman Ian Sams lashed out at CNN's senior legal analyst Elie Honig on Friday after Honig slammed the White House's response to the Hur report. [Screenshot CNN]")
White House spokesman Ian Sams lashed out at CNN’s senior legal analyst Elie Honig on Friday after Honig slammed the White House’s response to the Hur report.
Special counsel Robert Hur declined to pursue criminal charges against Biden despite describing him as having willfully possessed classified information covering important national security matters, according to his report. Hur said Biden, if forced to sit trial, “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Honig argued in a column published Friday in New York Magazine that Biden “knew he had highly classified documents in his home, kept them for a reason, and held on to them for years.”
“He arguably broke the law, and he definitely misled the American public,” Honig continued, adding it was “no accident” that Biden had the documents. (RELATED: ‘Oh!’: Reporter Catches KJP Off Guard, Then Presses Her On ‘Daily Show’ Dig At Biden)
“Indeed, for the past year, the president and his mouthpieces have doggedly denied intentionality,” Honig’s column claimed. “Biden’s attorney declared in January 2023, as the scandal broke, that ‘documents were inadvertently misplaced.’ Wrong. It wasn’t ‘inadvertent.’ Biden possessed at least some of the papers knowingly and on purpose.”
Honig then called out White House press sec. Karine Jean-Pierre for claiming Biden had no idea there were classified documents in his house, calling it a “false” statement on Jean-Pierre’s end.
Sams lashed out at Honig for the column, calling it “embarrassingly false.”
This is an embarrassingly false assessment by Elie Honig, amplified by Ken Dilanian, both of whom are smart and can read but apparently haven’t
All these theories are raised in the report then thoroughly dissembled by facts & evidence
I laid it all out in a letter to the press: https://t.co/F35NvxTvJM pic.twitter.com/tPtjHQ1tYn
— Ian Sams (@IanSams46) February 16, 2024
“This is an embarrassingly false assessment by Elie Honig, amplified by Ken Dilanian, both of whom are smart and can read but apparently haven’t,” Sams posted on Twitter. “All these theories are raised in the report then thoroughly dissembled by facts & evidence.”
Sams sent a letter to members of the White House press corps saying outlets were reporting “striking inaccuracies that misrepresent the report’s conclusion about the President.”
“Reporters in the White House Briefing Room have asked questions that include false content or are based on false premises,” Sams wrote in his letter, which drew rebuke from White House Correspondents’ Association President Kelly O’Donnell.
O’Donnell said Sams’ letter was “misdirected” and that the association “does not, cannot and will not serve as a repository for the government’s views of what’s in the news.”