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| Photo Credit: AP. |
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden sought out deceased Rep. Jackie Walorski on Wednesday during remarks at a hunger conference, saying “Where’s Jackie?” The White House press secretary later said the congresswoman had been “top of mind” for the president at the time.
Karine
Jean-Pierre did not acknowledge that Biden had misspoken during his remarks at
the White House conference on hunger, nutrition and health when he looked
around the room for Walorski, the Indiana congresswoman who died in an August
car crash.
Biden, in
his remarks. praised bipartisan lawmakers who worked on addressing childhood
hunger, including Rep. Jim McGovern, Sen. Mike Braun, Sen. Cory Booker and
Walorski, who was seen as a leader on the issue before her death.
“Representative
— Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie? I think she wasn’t going to be here —
to help make this a reality,” Biden said.
Jean-Pierre
faced repeated questioning during Wednesday’s White House press briefing about
Biden’s flub, saying more than a dozen times that Walorski was “top of mind”
for the president, who plans to meet with the congresswoman’s family at an
event Friday when he signs a bill renaming a Veterans Affairs clinic in Indiana
after her. She declined to say Biden had erred, nor did she issue an apology to
the late lawmaker’s family.
“My answer
is certainly not going to change,” she told reporters. “All of you may have
views on how I’m answering it, but I’m answering the question to the way that
he saw it and to the way that we see it.”