WASHINGTON — Under fire for seemingly snubbing one of its closest allies, the White House conceded Monday that it should have sent a high-ranking U.S. official to Paris over the weekend to demonstrate U.S. support in the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest admitted the mistake, siding with critics who assailed President Barack Obama for not attending the rally or sending a high ranking representative such as Vice President Joe Biden in his stead.
“It’s fair to say that we should have sent someone with a higher profile to be there,” Earnest said at the White House daily news briefing.
Earnest noted that sending a “high-level, highly visible” senior administration official would have demonstrated “that the American people stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our allies in France.”
He said there should be “no doubting” U.S. support for France, noting that Obama had offered assistance to President Francois Hollande during a call immediately after the attacks and that the U.S. and France were cooperating on counterterrorism measures.
While as many as 2 million people marched through the streets of Paris in a show of unity and defiance, about 50 world leaders marched with Hollande. Although U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Alejandro Mayorkas, the deputy secretary of homeland security, were in Paris for meetings with French officials, only the U.S. ambassador to France, Jane Hartley, joined the demonstration.
Earnest refused to provide any details on who had made the decision not to send a higher-ranking official, but said it was the White House’s responsibility.
“We here at the White House should’ve made a different decision,” he said.
He said the call did not rise to Obama’s level, saying it was “not a decision that was made by the president.”
Obama and Biden were at their homes over the weekend, Earnest acknowledged, but he wouldn’t say what the president was doing Sunday and said he hadn’t talked to him about any “personal regret” or whether he’d watched the march.
He did say he thought that Obama “himself would have liked to have had the opportunity to be there,” but noted that planning for the event began only Friday and the security arrangements for a presidential visit would have been considerable.
“I’m confident that the professionals at the Secret Service could overcome those challenges, but it would have been very difficult to do so without significantly impacting the ability of common citizens to participate in this march,” Earnest said.
Secretary of State John Kerry, who is scheduled to visit Paris on Thursday and meet with French officials Friday, dismissed talk of the low-level U.S. attendance as “quibbling” and said he looked forward to visiting France “to make it crystal clear how passionately we feel about the events that have taken place there.”
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said internal discussions continued until the day of the rally about how best to represent the United States.
She said security was among the factors in the decision against sending Obama or Biden. Holder was in meetings, and Kerry was “never an option” because of a prior commitment to high-level talks in India. She added, if “he could’ve been in Paris, he would’ve been.”
French ambassador to the U.S. Gerard Araud told MSNBC on Monday that “from the French side,” there were no hard feelings. He noted that Obama had signed a book of condolences Thursday at the French Embassy in Washington and Kerry had expressed condolences soon after the attacks in French, as well as English.
“We have been overwhelmed by the expression of solidarity, of grief, of friendship coming from all corners of the American people, from the highest level of the administration . to the ordinary Americans,” Araud said. “I can say Americans are compassionate people.”
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