Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Thursday he was mistaken in claiming that the Obama administration had failed to leave a pandemic playbook for the Trump White House.
“I was wrong,” McConnell said in an evening interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier. “They did leave behind a plan. So, I clearly made a mistake in that regard.”
McConnell had claimed during a Monday campaign event for President Donald Trump that the current White House had not been briefed by the previous administration on preparing for a pandemic at the scale of the new coronavirus. He also slammed former President Barack Obama for criticizing Trump’s coronavirus response (Obama had privately told former aides that it was an “absolute chaotic disaster”), saying Obama “should have kept his mouth shut.”
“We want to be early, ready for the next one, because clearly the Obama administration did not leave to this administration any kind of game plan for something like this,” McConnell said on Monday during a virtual interview with Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and campaign adviser.
But POLITICO had reported in March the existence of a document, written by Obama officials, that laid out how the incoming Trump administration should respond to a pandemic. The 69-page document contained hundreds of recommendations for dealing with many of the problems currently plaguing the nation’s coronavirus response — from shortages of personal protective equipment to the need for unified public guidance on the crisis.
Dr. Rick Bright, the vaccine expert who was recently ousted from the Department of Health and Human Services, testified before Congress earlier Thursday that the Trump administration severely botched its coronavirus response and misled the public on its handling of the outbreak. Bright contends that he was quickly pushed out of his post because he objected to a political drive for a malaria medication as a coronavirus treatment. Bright crafted a 63-page whistleblower complaint on the administration’s handling of the outbreak, making him the first federal official to openly dispute Trump’s claims of a successful response.
During his Thursday-evening interview on Fox News, McConnell demurred in commenting on how the Obama-era pandemic playbook factored into the Trump administration’s response.
“As to whether or not the plan was followed and who is the critic and all the rest,” he said, “I don’t have any observation about that because I don’t know enough about the details of that, Bret, to comment on it in any detail.”