May 7, 2021- 12:06 p.m.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said she plans to leave the role next year to spend more time with her family.
“I think it’s going to be time for somebody else to have this job in a year from now or about a year from now,” Psaki said in an interview with CNN’s David Axelrod, her former colleague in the Obama administration, on Thursday.
Psaki, who delivers regular press briefings as the public face of President Joe Biden’s administration, said she wanted to be able to spend more time with her two young children.”I don’t want to miss moments.
I don’t want to miss things, and I’m very mindful of that as well,” she said.
“It’s a great job,” she added. “It will be hard, but I also never thought I’d be here, and I also love my kids a lot.”
Psaki is a communications veteran and seasoned Democratic operative who worked on Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign in 2008 and subsequently served on his White House communications team as his deputy press secretary and deputy communications director.
She later became the spokesperson for the State Department before returning to the White House in 2015 as Obama’s communications director.
She has a long-standing relationship with Biden from her time in the Obama administration but was nonetheless a somewhat surprising pick as the new administration’s press secretary, having spent the previous four years working in a variety or media, consultancy, and academic roles.
Psaki told Axelrod that she had accepted the job after agreeing with Biden’s transition team that she would serve in the role for about a year, which would mean her leaving the post in January.
“When I talked to the inner circle of the Biden orbit, we talked about coming in and doing this job for a year, which was quite appealing to me for many reasons,” she said.
