White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined Wednesday to clarify why President Biden said in a rare interview that he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “rational actor.”

Biden made the pronouncement during a sitdown with CNN’s Jake Tapper before confusingly also saying Putin was “irrational” in invading Ukraine.

Journalists pressed Jean-Pierre to offer additional information on Biden’s assessment during an Air Force One flight to Colorado.

“The president’s assessment or evaluation that President Putin is a rational actor who made a bad strategic decision — that term carries weight in the nuclear context.  What’s that based on?…  Is that an intelligence assessment?” a reporter asked.

Jean-Pierre said that Biden “was a senator for 36 years and he was a vice president for eight years.  This is a place that — an arena, if you will, that he knows very well.”
 
“The president was very clear,” she said. “What he said was Putin was a rational actor who badly miscalculated.  And we’ve talked about why he badly miscalculated.”
 
Jean-Pierre said, “I will leave those words — let his comments stand.”

Another reporter followed up, “What we would like to get clarity on is why the president thinks Vladimir Putin is a rational actor.”

Jean-Pierre again declined to get into specifics, saying, “I’m going to just let his words stand. He said, the president’s words: he’s a rational actor who badly miscalculated. He miscalculated what his aggression, what his war that he created against Ukraine would lead to.”

“We know what he said,” a reporter interrupted. “We’re just curious why he thinks he’s a rational actor.”
 
“Again, I’m going to just let the president’s word stand for itself. He said he’s a rational actor that’s miscalculated,” Jean-Pierre repeated.

A reporter pressed, “It leaves a lot of open questions, what he said.” 

“I don’t think it leaves to a lot of open questions,” Jean-Pierre countered. “The president was very clear. It was an interview that he did. He was asked multiple times about Putin. He was asked multiple times about the war that Putin started. And the president answered it in the way that he believed in.”

On Thursday, Biden told Democratic donors at an event in New York City that the world faces the worst risk of nuclear “Armageddon” since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. He later tried to adjust that statement by telling Tapper Tuesday that “I don’t think” Putin would use a nuclear weapon, but added “I think that it’s irresponsible for him to talk about it.”

Putin has publicly alluded to to the US setting a “precedent” of using nuclear weapons with the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II as his nearly eight-month invasion of Ukraine falters.

The Russian leader last week signed a law to annex four partially occupied east Ukrainian regions after sham referendums, while also ordering a mass-mobilization of military reservists to replenish troop ranks amid a Ukrainian counteroffensive.