On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki stated that President Joe Biden is “not going to wade into the actions of prosecutors” in response to a question on whether the president will push against the softer prosecution policies of some prosecutors.
Psaki said the White House has “encouraged local leaders, local officials to take on the crime in their communities. That’s absolutely essential. What the president has proposed and what we’ll get — there will be a lot of discussion of this I expect over the next couple of months, is a significant plus-up of funding for local community policing programs, significantly increased from the last president. Because the president’s a believer in that.”
Co-host Dana Perino then asked, “Will he push on the progressive prosecutors that are, for example, here in New York City, saying that things like using — taking a gun into a store, robbing it, but then leaving and nobody gets killed that that’s a misdemeanor, is the president okay with that?”
Psaki responded, “Well, look, the president’s not going to wade into the actions of prosecutors or of the legal Justice Department. That’s his bottom line. But he’s also been very clear, he’s been a long-time supporter of COPS programs, of the police, of local first responders, of local law enforcement, and he has been an advocate for additional funding. As you know, it was a big issue of defunding the police, that was absolutely never anything he proposed or supported, even in the face of real criticism from within his own party.”
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