Biden confident in Pentagon's Austin despite judgment lapse
By Nandita Bose and Trevor Hunnicutt
EMMAUS, Pennsylvania (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden said on Friday that he has confidence in Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin despite what Biden agreed was a lapse in judgment by the Pentagon chief over his secret hospitalization.
Biden spoke to reporters in Pennsylvania, a hotly contested state in the 2024 election, as he campaigns on reviving faded manufacturing hubs.
Austin has been in a hospital receiving treatment for prostrate cancer since the beginning of the year. His failure to tell Biden he was hospitalized drew criticism from lawmakers and caught the White House by surprise. Biden has stood by Austin despite calls for the Pentagon chief to resign.
Asked if he had confidence in the defense chief, Biden, in his first public comments on the issue, said: «I do.» Asked if he considered Austin's failure to disclose his whereabouts a lapse in judgment, Biden said «Yes.»
Biden's focus of the trip, which included visits to a handful of small businesses in the onetime steel and manufacturing haven of the Lehigh Valley, was to illustrate his case that middle-class entrepreneurs and workers are thriving, inflation is waning and that the 81-year-old Democrat deserves a second term in office.
The president stopped by Emmaus Run Inn, which sells shoes and athletic gear, and jokingly asked the owner when he planned to open a store in Biden's home state of Delaware. He quipped that the owner should give accompanying reporters a pair of running shoes so they could take off.
He also made stops at a cycling store and a coffee shop.
«They're feeling much better about how the economy is doing. What we haven't done is letting them know exactly who got it changed,» Biden told reporters at the
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