WASHINGTON (AP) — White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Joe Biden sought out deceased Rep. Jackie Walorski on Wednesday during remarks at a hunger conference because the congresswoman had been "top of mind."
Watch the briefing in the player above.
Jean-Pierre did not acknowledge that Biden had misspoken during his remarks at the White House conference on hunger, nutrition and health when he looked around the room for Walorski, the Indiana congresswoman who died in an August car crash.
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Biden, in his remarks. praised bipartisan lawmakers who worked on addressing childhood hunger, including Rep. Jim McGovern, Sen. Mike Braun, Sen. Cory Booker and Walorski, who was seen as a leader on the issue before her death.
"Representative — Jackie, are you here? Where's Jackie? I think she wasn't going to be here — to help make this a reality," Biden said.
Jean-Pierre faced repeated questioning during Wednesday's White House press briefing about Biden's flub, saying more than a dozen times that Walorski was "top of mind" for the president, who plans to meet with the congresswoman's family at an event Friday when he signs a bill renaming a Veterans Affairs clinic in Indiana after her. She declined to say Biden had erred, nor did she issue an apology to the late lawmaker's family.
"My answer is certainly not going to change," she told reporters. "All of you may have views on how I'm answering it, but I'm answering the question to the way that he saw it and to the way that we see it."
Jean-Pierre also addressing what she called "sham" Russian referendums in occupied Ukrainian territory, saying they were "manufactured and manipulated" and "straight from the Kremlin playbook."
The comments came a day after pro-Moscow officials said people in all four occupied Ukrainian areas voted to join Russia in Kremlin-run referendums by overwhelming numbers.
Blasting the results as "an exercise in coercion and disinformation executed by puppet authorities," the White House declared Russia's actions to be "transparently fraudulent and have no legal significance whatsoever."
"We will never recognize these illegal and illegitimate attempts at annexation," Jean-Pierre said.
The preordained outcome sets the stage for a dangerous new phase in Russia's seven-month war, with the Kremlin threatening to throw more troops into the battle and potentially use nuclear weapons.
The press secretary also commented on the explosions under the Baltic Sea that let to leaks from the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines.
Jean-Pierre said the White House is in touch with European partners on the "apparent sabotage" of the pipelines and supports efforts to investigate the explosions.
But she underscored, any probe "could take some time."