Peter Doocy on Biden Snapping at Question: Biden Won’t Give Us 5 Minutes of Clarity

Peter Doocy, reporter and Fox News Channel’s White House Correspondent, joined the Guy Benson Show for an exclusive interview following his paternity after having his first child. Guy and Peter discussed a variety of topics including the unprecedented upcoming trials during the 2024 presidential election season. They also discussed the recent Biden optics – including Biden snapping back at Peter for asking a simple question on Hunter. Listen to the full interview below.

Full interview:

Doocy had this to say:

“We could we could address all of this and move on if we just had like 5 minutes of clarity with the president. But since I don’t think that that is going to happen any time soon, we might just have to piece it together. Question by question, Event by event.”

Full transcript:

Guy Benson: With us now is Peter Doocy, Fox News White House Correspondent. Peter, great to have you back.  

Peter Doocy: Thank you, Guy. Good to be here.  

Guy Benson: So it’s my understanding that you were recently on paternity leave there for a while off the air, taking care of your new kiddo. And I think I might need some pro tips from you coming up soon. Maybe we can have a beer summit around the neighborhood.  

Peter Doocy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you got it. See… we got her to sleep through the night. So we got some… we got some tips.  

Guy Benson: Oh, congratulations. That is a huge deal. So I will definitely need to pick your brain about that. All right, let’s talk politics and your beat. I want to start with yesterday and then bleeding into today. A lot of the criticism around the White House in their response to the disaster in Maui, which has been pretty muted up to this point. I know today they finally said the president is going to address it and was going to talk about it in, I believe, the Midwest where he was traveling. But up until that point, it was some tweets. It was a no comment from the President himself. It was a bit of a mess yesterday from Karine Jean-Pierre. They were getting hit from all sides on this. What do you make of it?  

Peter Doocy: I just have to think that when somebody was shouting out to the President in Delaware while he was at the beach about the rising death toll in Maui, he must have thought that they were shouting about something else when he just answered no comment and kind of smiled and got back in his car. As somebody who has been with him most days of my life for the last four full years, I don’t think that that is a response characteristic of him and the way that he operates. And so I think he must have just thought that he was getting something else and was just planning on giving a no comment no matter what. And it just came out really, really callously, which I… I wasn’t there, so I don’t know. But it had to have been a miscommunication.  

Guy Benson: That was my guess as well. And I said it publicly. I said, they’re going to clean this up. They’re going to say he didn’t hear the question properly, but then they didn’t say that. I mean, that wasn’t available and certainly plausible thing for them to come out and say as an explanation for why that moment happened. Instead, we got the performance from Karine Jean-Pierre from the podium yesterday where she really didn’t have much to say and she butchered the names of the senators and all of that. It was weird, and I know that clearly they’ve decided this has not been going well, at least from a PR standpoint, so a bit of a change of pace today, as I mentioned. One interaction that I would argue is more characteristic of the way the President operates was your exchange with him last week about the Hunter Biden investigation, the new revelations? There have been a lot of developments in that case since you really first asked him about it years ago. He issued a blanket denial back in 2019 on the campaign trail. Here was the latest iteration of that ongoing exchange, years apart. Cut 23.  

Peter Doocy: There’s this testimony now where one of your son’s former business associates is claiming that you were on speakerphone a lot with them talking business. Is that what?  

Joe Biden: Never talked business. And I knew you’d have a lousy question.  

Peter Doocy: Well, what do you it’s… Why is that a lousy question?  

Guy Benson: Because it’s not true. Because it’s not true. And that’s almost verbatim what he ended up telling you back in 2019 and scolded you for not asking the right sort of questions this time he called it a lousy question. And I think what Biden would suggest is that his position has been consistent throughout. Except, Peter, you and I both know and anyone paying attention to this story, what the Biden camp was arguing and the categorical nature of their denials back then, that has evolved rather dramatically, especially in recent months, even recent weeks at the White House, but ultimately the same dismissive tone toward you in the same basically broad denial.  

Peter Doocy: And I, I get that that’s not what he wants to be talking about. He would rather talk about like at that event a couple of days ago, it was a we were at a wind tower factory. The thing that makes the windmills really tall, that stands him up. He was talking about that, but. It’s just there are so many questions. And, you know, if they would just give me 5 minutes with them straight. Right. Don’t have to worry about him walking away off the rope line where I could just say, okay, this is the accusation. Like you were talking to these people at a dinner and on the phone 20 times. Like, what were you talking about? Okay. There are accusations that Hunter was paying your bills and set money aside with proceeds from his foreign business dealings. Did that happen? Like, if we just had the time because everything in the briefing room on this subject gets referred to, like Hunter Biden’s lawyers, or they say that they can’t talk about it because the Hatch act like if the election somehow and… I don’t know but we could we could address all of this and move on if we just had like 5 minutes of clarity with the president. But since I don’t think that that is going to happen any time soon, we might just have to piece it together. Question by question, Event by event.  

Guy Benson: Yeah, and it’s useful to get them on the record, even when he’s ornery about it, because he said some things unequivocally back in 2019 when you were on the campaign beat with him, and he could not have been any clearer about his lack of knowledge, interactions, any of that. And clearly the story he’d been telling then is factually false. That was not true what he said then. Now they’ve moved on to saying, well, he wasn’t in business with his son. They didn’t talk business. There’s questions about that evidence suggesting that also could be untrue. But to your point, Peter, the stonewall from this White House on this subject has been a combination of him basically taking no questions. The White House Press Secretary and her deputies refusing to answer anything about this scandal and the alleged corruption and really all of it. And then I think a third key component is generally when a politician gets caught in a number of lies and there’s swirling new evidence and that sort of thing, the press corps tends to get kind of voracious about it. And there are follow ups to the follow ups and people sort of pile on and all the networks and different correspondents, they are all driving at the same story. And that hasn’t really happened yet on this. And I feel like maybe the dynamic would change. The stonewalling would have to crumble a little bit if more people were asking these types of questions. But as long as it’s you guys and The New York Post and a few other outlets and that’s really it, I guess it makes it somewhat easy, relatively easy for the White House to maintain the posture of effectively no comment, Move on.  

Peter Doocy: Yeah, and that’s particularly true since it does deal with an ongoing criminal case, since it seems like the Hunter Biden plea deal is like dead dead, even though he’s been tried to say that part of it was still alive as recently as like an hour ago. But and I know there are bigger issues that impact people in this country more directly every day. However, the House Republicans that control a whole branch of government, they are making this like the number one issue. And so because they are we need we need to know. And that’s why we will keep asking.  

Guy Benson: Yeah. And Peter, you’ve been doing this a while. You know how this goes. Politicians want to talk about what politicians want to talk about, right? They’ll get up, they’ll talk to the team, they’ll strategize, they’ll huddle. All right, here’s the calm strategy for today. Here’s what you want to drive in terms of a narrative. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they don’t because they don’t get to choose and decide what they’re asked about. The media is going to ask what they’re going to ask about. I’d imagine, for example, the Trump administration would, if they had their druthers, not have had to answer questions basically every single day for four years about the Russiagate hoax, which turned out to be a total conspiracy theory made up. But the media focused on it incessantly and the questions always came and you answer the questions that are posed to you. That’s how this works. Sometimes the media is a little bit more aggressive, a little bit more adversarial. I think sometimes it depends on the political alignment of the subject of the questioning. But setting that aside, as you said, the questions have to be asked. You are doing that job, as are a few others in that room. One of the reasons why we love having you here as a colleague and having you on the program when you have time for us and you generously come on the show. Peter, we appreciate it.  

Peter Doocy: Thanks, Guy.