White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki has opened up on threats she has received against herself and members of her family while working as Joe Biden’s chief spokeswoman.
“I will say the thing that has been hardest, personally, is I have had threats, I have had nasty letters, texts to me with my personal address, the names of my children. It crosses lines, you know, and that’s when it becomes a little scary. And that has been the most personally difficult aspect of this job,” Psaki said, speaking to reporters on Thursday morning.
Psaki noted that some of the threats have been so bad that she’s had to report them to the Secret Service. “I certainly have shared information with them,” she said.
The spokeswoman said she realized that she was a “public figure,” and that people could “like” or “dislike” her. She added, however, that she had children aged six and four, and that she was worried “about their safety.”
Psaki clarified that no one has actually physically carried through with threats or come to her house. She complained, however, that the Arlington branch of the Republican Party had “circulated” her address.
The Arlington GOP dismissed these claims, telling Politico that it “has not publicly disseminated any Biden Administration official's home address, unlike the hordes of progressive activists online who have disseminated the addresses of Justices of the Supreme Court.”
Psaki is expected to give her final press conference as Biden’s press secretary on Friday before handing things off to Karine Jean-Pierre, her deputy.
Psaki was tapped to serve as Joe Biden’s press secretary in November 2020. She hinted at plans to leave the job just months into the job, telling former Clinton advisor David Axelrod in May 2021 that she would quit “about a year from now.”
Before working for Biden, Psaki served between as deputy press secretary and White House deputy communications director in the Obama administration, and, between 2013 and 2015, as the State Department’s spokeswoman. She was also a political contributor for CNN between 2017 and 2020.
Throughout her tenure in both the Obama and Biden administrations, Psaki became well-known for an endless series of foot-in-mouth gaffes and goofs. In one of her first press conferences for Biden in January 2021, she lost her train of thought while bashing Russia, called NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg the secretary-general of the UN, and almost called Secretary of State Antony Blinken “President Blinken.”