White House Press Secretary Sits Down For An Interview Transcript

Joining me now for an exclusive interview, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. Miss Jean-Pierre, welcome back to The Sunday Show.

Hello, Jonathan. Thank you for having me back. Really appreciate it.

And thank you for being here live on set with me. First to start the conversation, your reaction to the news of what happened to Paul Pelosi.

I have to say, just watching and hearing the comments from the speaker is heartbreaking and it is, I can’t even imagine. I don’t want to imagine what they’re going through. And of course it’s traumatizing. And we heard from the president yesterday afternoon, and folks also heard from the vice president last night. Our thoughts are with the family, with Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul Pelosi and clearly their children. And we wish him a speedy recovery. But it is horrific, it is horrific and just very sad what we’re seeing. And it goes to what we’re seeing currently. We have to condemn political violence. It is something that should not be controversial. It is something that should not be partisan. It is something that all of us need to say that and it should be done in one voice, but sadly it has become political and we need to end this.

(01:15)
This is what the president has said multiple times and he’s talked about it in his speeches and his remarks. And the thing that is probably the most haunting about when we hear the reports of this assailant, of the attacker that we were speaking of, is that he was yelling out the things that we heard during January 6th, which is, where is Nancy? And again, we need to end this type of rhetoric. It needs to stop and it is incredibly, incredibly dangerous.

Well, listening to you makes me wonder, has the White House, has the president reached out to say, Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, house minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, in an effort to get everyone together and put out a bipartisan condemnation or statement about the political environment we’re in and tamping down the rhetoric, a unified show of force against what we’re facing right.

Well, as you know, you interviewed the president most recently and he believes in reaching out to the other side and working together. And that is something that you see throughout his career. So that is not anything that’s unusual, right, for him to reach over to the other side. I don’t have anything to speak of about any type of statement, a bipartisan statement, but the president himself has been very clear. He has talked about that. When you interviewed the president, you all talked about the soul of the nation. The reason why this president ran for president in the first place just a couple of years ago, which is the attack that we were seeing on democracy. We still have people out there who are undermining that, undermining our free and fair elections. And the President has spoken to that multiple times in multiple speeches. And what we saw in January 6th still exists. It still exists. But again, this should not be a partisan issue.

How worried is the White House about the potential for more political violence as we get to the midterms, but also on midterm election day?

Well, one of the things that the president has talked about, yes, he talks about condemning violence, political violence, toning down the rhetoric and how our democracy is currently still under attack. But there’s also optimism, right? Because he believes there’s majority of Americans out there who do not want to see that, who do not want to see our democracy under attack. If anything, that’s one of the reasons why he was so successful in 2020. So it is up to us to make sure that we continue to protect our democracy, that we continue to strengthen our democracy, but also by him being out there and speaking so forcefully to that issue and I want to be very careful because I can’t speak to elections and I can’t speak to politics, but what he’s out there saying is that there is a choice to be made. There is so much at stake, so much at stake, and there are differences to what Congressional, what he and congressional Democrats are trying to do when we talk about the economy, when we talk about our democracy and what congressional Republicans are trying to do.