Jen Psaki once told reporters that Joe Biden was so energetic she sometimes had trouble keeping up with him.
Now she wants to give Karoline Leavitt a lecture on honesty.
The journalists who actually sat in that briefing room kept records of their own.
Psaki Calls Karoline Leavitt a Liar on Live TV After White House Press Secretary Departure
Former Biden White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki used her MS NOW program, The Briefing, to unload on Leavitt's just-announced departure from the White House.
Leavitt, 28, the youngest press secretary in American history, announced she's stepping down at the end of August to spend more time with her two young children.
Psaki saw an opening.
"The relationship between the press and the White House is supposed to be adversarial by design," Psaki said on air.
She accused Leavitt of engineering the opposite. "She did everything she could to reshape that briefing room into her own personal safe space where she rarely had to answer a tough question, hardly ever," Psaki said.
Then she went further.
"It's been about telling the version of the truth according to the serial liar who sits in the Oval Office," Psaki said, accusing Leavitt of "lying repeatedly" and of caring only about Trump – not the American people.
White House Reporters Fact Check Psaki's Claims About Leavitt's Briefings
Wid Lyman covered the Trump White House as an independent journalist and pushed back with receipts.
Reporters who worked the beat under Leavitt told him the press team was "first class" – and that there was "way, way more going on during this administration compared to the last."
Reporters without assigned seats routinely crowded the room beyond its 49 permanent positions – hardly the controlled echo chamber Psaki described.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle delivered the official response in eleven words: "Jen 'Circle Back' Psaki couldn't hold a candle to Karoline Leavitt."
Psaki Covered Up Biden Cognitive Decline – Then Called Leavitt a Liar
Psaki stood at that same podium for over a year – daily – deflecting every question about Biden's mental fitness. Reporters asked. She waved them off. The White House kept insisting the 80-year-old commander in chief had everything under control.
When the cover-up finally collapsed at the June 2024 debate, Psaki went on Semafor's Mixed Signals podcast and claimed she was blindsided.
"I never saw that person – not a single time – and I was in the Oval Office every day," she said, referring to the Biden who froze on national television.
When asked directly whether there had been a cover-up, she chose her words carefully. "Cover-up is a very loaded term," she said.
The same woman who refused to call hiding a president's mental decline a cover-up just called Karoline Leavitt a liar on cable television.
Leavitt, at her very first briefing in January 2025, promised to tell "the truth from this podium every single day" and opened the briefing room to conservative media and podcasters the Biden White House had systematically locked out. Biden's team had yanked 442 press credentials in 2023 alone – mostly from right-leaning outlets.
Karoline Leavitt Leaves With a Legacy Psaki Cannot Match
Psaki is a cable host on a struggling left-wing network now, watching a 28-year-old woman exit the most prominent communications job in the country with her reputation intact and her future wide open.
Trump has already announced Leavitt will become one of his top outside advisors heading into the midterms. She leaves with a sterling record and the respect of the president she served.
Psaki leaves behind a different legacy – a Biden White House that buried a president's mental collapse for years and called it "aging" when the cameras finally caught up.
Leavitt told the truth about Biden's decline from day one, in the same room where Psaki had spent a year making sure nobody could pin it down.
The lecture on honesty was a mistake.
Sources:
- Teri Christoph, "Biden's Former Press Secretary Calls Karoline Leavitt a Liar – Then Gets Hit With a Brutal Fact Check," RedState, August 14, 2026.
- Nicholas Spinnato, "MS NOW's Peter Alexander Reunites with Jen Psaki, Implies Leavitt Lies," NewsBusters, August 14, 2026.
- Teri Christoph, "Karoline Leavitt Understood the Assignment," RedState, August 14, 2026.
- Staff, "Karoline Leavitt Raised the Bar for All White House Press Secretaries to Come," PJ Media, August 13, 2026.
- Fox News Staff, "Psaki Attacks Outgoing Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt," Fox News Digital, August 14, 2026.
- Fox News Staff, "Jen Psaki Insists She Never Saw Diminished Biden While Working as Press Secretary," Fox News, May 3, 2025.
- Staff, "Psaki Pushes Back on Idea of 'Cover-Up' for Biden's Mental Decline," Washington Examiner, May 4, 2025.
