Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki is being compelled to retract a false claim from her new book that President Biden did not check his watch during the dignified transfer of 13 US troops killed in the Afghanistan withdrawal.
In her May 2024 book “Say More,” Psaki criticized her former boss’s detractors, claiming they misrepresented the moment to portray him as insensitive and only concerned with time, asserting he “only looked at his watch after the ceremony had ended.”
However, Axios first reported on the book’s inaccuracy. Photos, videos, and media fact-checkers had already confirmed Biden’s action during the ceremony.
Psaki later admitted to Axios that 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,” but did not directly address the claim’s inaccuracy.
“The story on Afghanistan is really about the importance of delivering feedback even when it is difficult, told through my own experience of telling President Biden that his own story of loss was not well received by the families who were grieving their sons and daughters,” Psaki added to the outlet.
A press representative for Scribner, the publisher of the book, confirmed to The Post that the text “will be corrected in the e-book and future printings, due to inaccuracies as originally written.”
Six Gold Star family members, in an exclusive interview with The Post on Monday, demanded a retraction and an apology from Psaki for inaccurately portraying the highly scrutinized moment as mere “misinformation.”
“It needs to be removed,” said Darin Hoover, whose son, Marine Staff Sgt. Taylor Hoover, 31, was killed in the blast from an ISIS-K suicide bombing at Hamid Karzai International Airport’s Abbey Gate in Kabul.
“To go and put this in the book and memorialize it for all to see is nothing short of disgusting. I mean, it’s reprehensible to me,” Hoover said.
Coral Briseno, the mother of Marine Cpl. Humberto Sanchez, 22, added, “We are not liars. We’re just seeking justice for our kids. And we are not trying to make this up. We’re not trying to make anybody look bad. We don’t care if it was Trump or if it was Biden,” expressing that it showed “disrespect for our families, for our loved ones, and for the people that die for this country.”
Representatives for MSNBC, where Psaki began hosting “Inside with Jen Psaki” in March 2023 after leaving her White House press role, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Steve Nikoui, who was arrested in March for shouting his slain son’s name at Biden during the State of the Union address, stated that the White House and former administration aides like Psaki “want to forget about this. They don’t want anything from that day or that whole evacuation to come to light at all. And so any chance that it comes up, they shut it down — immediately,” said the father of Marine Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui, 20.
“If the American people want to keep these people in office or keep these people on television and support them and give them, you know, multimillion-dollar jobs, well, then they have to answer for that when they die. Not me,” he added.
Mark Schmitz, the father of Marine Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz, 20, highlighted Biden’s crass behavior during an August 2023 roundtable with Gold Star families in the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“Not only does she owe us an apology, she needs to take that story down,” Schmitz said of Psaki. “I blasted Biden about the watch deal at the family roundtable, and I brought it up several times in numerous interviews. Jen Psaki’s full of s–t.”
Asked whether the former White House press secretary should face consequences for the falsehood, the military families unanimously agreed.
