After a press conference between President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, CNN reporter, Kaitlan Collins asked Biden about “changing Putin’s behavior.”
Collins asked, “Why are you so confident [Putin] will change his behavior, Mr. President?”
Biden responded angrily while pointing his finger at her, “I’m not confident I’m going to change his behavior. What the hell? What do you do all the time?”
“When did I say I was confident? I said … what I said was, let’s get it straight, I said what will change their behavior is if the rest of the world reacts to them and it diminishes their standing in the world. I am not confident of anything. I am just stating the facts,” he continued.
Collins followed up on her question, “But given his past behavior has not changed and in that press conference, after sitting down with you for several hours, he denied any involvement in cyberattacks. He downplayed human rights abuses. He even refused to say Alexey Navalny’s name. So how does that account to a constructive meeting, as President Putin put it?”
Being that Collins wasn’t part of the seven press members hand selected prior to the Q&A, Biden didn’t have a scripted response.
“If you don’t understand that, you are in the wrong business,” he responded plainly.
Later in an interview, Biden apologized to Collins to reporters.
“I apologize for having been short,” he said.
Biden then said, “Look, to be a good reporter, you’ve gotta be negative. You’ve gotta have a negative view of life, it seems to me, the way you all… you never ask a positive question.”
He added, “You never ask positive questions.”
