Ex-Biden White House staffer Michael LaRosa alleged that former President Joe Biden’s staffers made “really unethical” demands of the press in an effort to “bully” reporters into covering the president in a favorable manner.
LaRosa, who served as former first lady Jill Biden’s press secretary, detailed this alleged bullying campaign to “The Young Turks” host Cenk Uygur on Tuesday.
“They did bully a lot of journalists, and I think they would tell you that now. They wouldn’t have told you at the time,” LaRosa claimed.
The former staffer claimed that Biden’s communication team was “very hostile and very suspicious” of journalists under the leadership of Anita Dunn, acting as if they were operating “out of a bunker” while performing their jobs.
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He wondered why an administration which was running a reelection campaign that claimed “democracy is at stake” would go to such great lengths to discredit any press or polls that showed the president in a negative light.
“Years ago I was saying I don’t know why we are, if we are running a re-election campaign, with ‘the democracy is at stake,’ why we are trashing journalism? We are trashing the polls, we are trashing anybody who covers, talks or tweets about a poll, anybody who talks about age. It was a problem. It was a problem because not one poll, but every poll said it was a problem,” LaRosa noted.
He also questioned why this alleged bullying was even necessary, considering the “goodwill” that Biden already had with the media.
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“I never understood it because there was so much goodwill that [Joe Biden] had with the media, had with the press, coming off of Donald Trump,” he noted.
The former staffer revealed that members of the Biden team made “unethical” demands from journalists dating back to the president’s 2020 campaign, after Uygur questioned how the former president’s team would “bully the press.”
“I thought it was weird that they only did interviews for ‘quote approval.’ There was this thing in Biden world about quote approval, everything had to be on quote approval,” LaRosa responded.
He then explained how this “quote approval” process would work, detailing that “one person” on Biden’s team would be assigned a reporter, who they were responsible for deciding “what the reporter can use, what quotes they can use” after conducting an interview with the president.
According to LaRosa, young members of Biden’s staff were “dog trained” on how to coerce the press into only asking the president certain questions and gaining access to these questions ahead of interviews.
“You saw them get caught trying to script questions to radio reporters that summer, summer of 2024. It was very reminiscent to me of being on the campaign in 2020, where these young press staffers in these states like New Hampshire, or Iowa, or Nevada, they were sort of like dog trained to make the questions conditional for interviews,” he alleged.
LaRosa claimed that he was never comfortable with these practices, and asked staffers on his team to “never” ask journalists to share their questions with them before interviews with the former first lady.
“I said to them, ‘Please never ask the journalist for the questions ahead of time. You can always ask about the topics, but do not ask them for the questions for Dr. Biden,’” he explained, noting a difference between how he expected his staffers to interact with the press, and how the president’s team operated.
While “the boys side,” which the president’s team was referred to as by LaRosa, was free to “do their own thing” regarding the press, he made sure to let the staffers on his team know that they would not be following suit.
“My job was to protect my boss, and they could handle their, we called it the boys side, the boys team could do their thing with regard to prepping [Joe Biden] for interviews. But I did not want – I knew from being a former producer at NBC, having long relationships in the press, that was just like 101,” LaRosa asserted. “It was really unethical to be doing that, but these young kids are really taught to make that a part of their sort of pre-pre-screening for interviews.”
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Although these “unethical” practices were intended to give the former president an edge during the 2020 election cycle, LaRosa believed that they actually backfired on Biden, showcased in the now-notorious June 27 debate against President Donald Trump, which highlighted Biden’s mental decline.
Biden’s lone term turned out to be defined in part by his historic decision to belatedly abandon a reelection bid, as well as concerns about his age and mental cognition. One White House reporter who covered Biden told Fox News Digital that the mental acuity issue was the “third rail” for the administration, a term for something too touchy to discuss.
“This was something that you knew would put you in the penalty box if you asked about or speculated, and there were a number of large publications who were more than happy to do splashy write-ups about how Joe Biden leads,” they said. “But somehow this issue, a central issue, didn’t come out until the Atlanta debate made it inescapable, and I’m not certain that a lot of the folks who are patting themselves on the back deserve it.”
Biden’s team did a “really good job of hiding him,” the reporter added.
By the end of LaRosa’s tenure with the Biden administration, he was confident that Biden’s press team had done more to harm the president’s reputation than to help it.
“I learned over the course of the next four years, and I learned a lot last summer just how bad their instincts actually are, and how their instincts really didn’t serve the president very well, because no matter how hostile they were, or how punitive they were to the reporters covering Biden, his press coverage never improved. In fact, it only got worse,” LaRosa asserted.
He continued to rail against Biden’s press team’s efforts, noting that coverage of the president “never got better.”
“It didn’t do the Biden White House any favors. The president’s reputation, his image, his trust, his approval numbers never got better. There was not any good waves of press that he received,” LaRosa claimed, adding, “And part of that was because, you know, they burnt and just carpet bombed his relationships with members of the press who he cared about.”
The Biden team did not immediately reply to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Fox News Digital’s Brian Flood and David Rutz contributed to this report.