The Biden Administration Dissolves into Pettiness

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, January 16, 2025

 

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office spent the day Wednesday refusing to confirm media reports speculating that a cease-fire agreement with Hamas in the Gaza Strip was imminent, and it seems today like that caution was warranted. A last-minute effort by Hamas’s negotiators to dictate which of the 1,000-plus Palestinian security threats in Israeli custody the country will be compelled to release threw the talks into “crisis.” But Hamas is now reportedly “backing down” from its gambit. We will soon learn more about the terms of the agreement, which looks to some less like the basis for an Israeli victory and more like a recipe for more war at a time and place of Hamas’s choosing.

 

If that’s an erroneous interpretation, the Biden White House isn’t doing much to clear up any lingering doubts. The State Department, by contrast, has been more forthcoming.

 

During his final briefing with reporters, Foggy Bottom spokesman Matthew Miller went into granular detail about the deal’s outlines and how it would progress in stages. He praised “President-elect Trump’s team,” which “has been absolutely critical in getting this deal over the line.” And, when faced with a flurry of hostile questions from the foreign press about Israel’s perfidy, he informed them of their thoughtless misapprehension.

 

“I think it’s a fundamental misreading of the situation,” Miller said of the international media’s anti-Israel biases. “It has not been Israel that has been the intransigent party that has kept us from getting to a deal for many, many months,” he continued. “But it has been Hamas, fundamentally, that has been unwilling to agree to a deal really going back to August,” he added, noting that it was either “unwilling to negotiate” or “unable to negotiate” because of the decimation of its leadership.

 

Miller’s performance was valuable and clarifying, and his colleagues in the West Wing appeared to resent it. Shortly after his presser, Miller had the rug pulled out from under him by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

 

When asked about Miller’s remarks, and specifically his willingness to spread credit (such as it is) for the deal around, Jean-Pierre was dismissive. “I mean, look, I’m not going to — to speak to a random person,” Jean-Pierre said of her counterpart at State. “He’s literally your colleague,” Bloomberg reporter Jenny Leonard shot back. “I don’t know who this person is,” Jean-Pierre insisted.

 

That wasn’t all Jean-Pierre didn’t know. She seemed unprepared to discuss the terms of the Israeli-Hamas deal with any specificity, deferring instead to Biden’s Mideast envoy Brett McGurk’s forthcoming briefing with reporters. Instead, she spent much of the engagement assuring reporters that the accords were the work of the Biden team alone — the president, in particular, what with his extensive experience deftly navigating geopolitics.

 

The conspicuous dearth of information on offer led reporters to wonder why it was Jean-Pierre holding this briefing rather than a more experienced hand like national security spokesman John Kirby. As Fox News Channel’s Jacqui Heinrich frustratedly observed, Jean-Pierre made “zero news” and had “no details on the ceasefire/hostage deal,” but her sources told her that the press secretary “blocked” Kirby from briefing reporters because she wanted “to keep the spotlight to herself.” Don’t believe her? How about the Wall Street Journal? “White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stopped NSC spokesman John Kirby from briefing at the podium today,” the Journal’s Alex Ward confirmed, “during which he would have briefed on the Israel-Hamas cease-fire.”

 

As much as we might like to attribute Jean-Pierre’s desire to hog the limelight to her vanity, we can’t rule out the prospect that reserving all glory for Joe Biden was a presidential initiative. At a press conference earlier in the day, Biden was asked whether he or Trump deserves more credit for the deal. “Is that a joke,” Biden smirked. Not really — it’s a live question raised by his own administration’s inconsistencies.

 

It was a characteristically peevish end to an uncommonly petty administration.