Fox News White House Correspondent Peter Doocy cornered Press Secretary Jen Psaki on both her claims that inflation was likely to be temporary and the Biden administration’s repeated insistence that the rising cost of gas could be tied solely to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Doocy pointed to Psaki’s claim, made a short time earlier in Thursday’s White House press briefing, that economists were predicting that inflation would begin to resolve by the end of the year — and he noted that the Biden administration had been claiming that inflation would be “transitory” or “temporary” since spring of 2021, only to reach record levels at the end of the year.
WATCH:
DOOCY TIME: "We just heard you say….you think inflation is going to be temporary. We've heard you say [that] since last spring, so how long do you guys think temporary is?
Psaki: "Well…what we do is…rely on the assessments of the [Fed] and of outside economic analysts[.]" pic.twitter.com/UUCSmDBOzT
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) March 10, 2022
“We just heard you say again that you think inflation is going to be temporary. We’ve heard you say that it was going to be temporary since last spring, so how long do you guys think temporary is?” Doocy asked.
“Well, again, Peter, I think what we do is we rely on the assessments of the Federal Reserve and of outside economic analysts who give an assessment of how long they think it will last,” Psaki replied. “The expectations and their assessment at this point continues to be that it will moderate by the end of the year. There is also no question that when a foreign dictator invades a foreign country and when that foreign dictator is the head of a country that is the third largest supplier of oil in the world, that that is going to have an impact, and it is.”
Doocy then pivoted to the White House’s repeated attempts to blame the gas price hikes entirely on Russian President Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, asking whether the Biden administration’s strategy going forward was just going to be blaming Putin for everything that went wrong until November’s midterm elections.
WATCH:
Doocy 🔥🔥: "inflation goes up today. The President's statement blames the #PutinPriceHike. Are you guys going to just start blaming Putin for everything until the midterms?"
Psaki: "Well, we've seen the price of gas go up at least $.75 since…Putin lined up troops[.]" pic.twitter.com/WcmfcQDSWL
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) March 10, 2022
“And so to that point, inflation goes up today. The President’s statement blames the ‘Putin Price Hike.’ Are you guys just going to start blaming Putin for everything until the midterms?” Doocy asked.
“Well, we’ve seen the price of gas go up at least $.75 since President Putin lined up troops on the border of Ukraine,” Psaki replied.
Doocy pressed Psaki on the same issue three days earlier, as The Daily Wire reported:
“It sound like you are blaming Putin for the increase in gas prices recently, but weren’t gas prices going up anyway because of post-pandemic supply chain issues?” Doocy asked.
“Well, I think that there’s no question that as we have seen and outside analysts have conveyed this as well, the increase and the anticipated continued increase, which is I think what some of your colleagues were asking about, that is a direct result of the invasion of Ukraine, and also there was an anticipation of that,” Psaki replied, appearing to suggest that gas prices had only risen prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because the markets had anticipated it.