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White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki took aim at Donald Trump in a cutting response to a question.
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Psaki referenced Trump’s repeated attempts to interfere with Justice Department investigations.
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She said: “We do something new here… and allow the Justice Department to act independently.”
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White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Biden would not try to influence the Department of Justice like former President Donald Trump did, in a cutting response to a question from Fox News anchor Steve Doocy.
Doocy asked Psaki whether the Biden administration wished the DOJ to resume its investigation into harassment allegations leveled against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
It came after the office of the New York Attorney General found that the governor had sexually harassed nearly a dozen women who were mostly state employees.
Cuomo defended himself against the allegations and said the “facts are much different than what has been portrayed.”
“Does the administration want the Justice Department to initiate a civil rights investigation into these harassment allegations revealed today?” Doocy asked.
Psaki replied: “We do something new here that feels foreign from the last four years and allow the Justice Department to act independently on investigations.”
Psaki was taking aim at the repeated attempts by Donald Trump to interfere in Justice Department investigations, which were detailed in multiple news reports.
The former president last year pressed Justice Department officials to declare that the presidential election was rigged against him, despite a lack of evidence to support the theory, The New York Times reported in July.
The report said that Trump called Jeffrey Rosen, the then-acting attorney general, and his deputy Richard Donoghue and asked them to “say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me,” according to a note of the conversation taken by Donoghue.
The Department of Justice, meanwhile, has not indicated whether it will investigate the harassment allegations detailed by the New York Attorney General’s office.
The department in July said it would not pursue an investigation into whether Cuomo’s administration mishandled COVID-19 outbreaks in nursing homes, Bloomberg reported.
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