“If the White House is trying now to prove the vim, vigor and acuity of the president, I don’t know how they do that by sending questions first before the interview so the president knows what’s coming,” says CNN’s Blackwell.
A radio host who interviewed Joe Biden on Wednesday told CNN that the White House sent her questions to ask him before the interview.
Host Victor Blackwell asked Andrea Lawful-Sanders, host of “The Source” on WURD, if the White House had sent her questions or if she submitted her own questions for approval prior to interviewing Biden.
“The questions were sent to me for approval. I approved of them,” she said.
A radio host who interviewed President Biden Wednesday tells me the White House sent her the questions before the interview. pic.twitter.com/9L6PRaUvgG
— Victor Blackwell CNN (@VictorBlackwell) July 6, 2024
“I got several questions, eight of them, and the four that were chosen were the ones that I approved.”
Blackwell noted that if the White House wanted to assuage voters about Biden’s “vim and vigor”, sending questions to an interviewer for pre-approval was not the right course of action.
“It’s just that, if the White House is trying now to prove the vim, vigor and acuity of the president, I don’t know how they do that by sending questions first before the interview so the president knows what’s coming,” Blackwell said.
A second radio host told ABC News that the White House also sent him questions beforehand.
“Yes, I was given some questions for Biden,” Earl Ingram of CivicMedia told ABC News, adding he was given five questions and ended up asking four of them.
“I didn’t get a chance to ask him all the things I wanted to ask,” he said.
The Biden campaign pushed back on these reports, stating, “We do not condition interviews on acceptance of these questions, and hosts are always free to ask the questions they think will best inform their listeners.”
Biden tried and failed to assure voters that he’s mentally and physically fit to execute the duties of the presidency, claiming everything he does on a daily basis “is a cognitive test.”
