Reince Priebus, who was unceremoniously ousted as White House chief of staff last summer, went on Meet the Press Sunday morning to affirm that everything he saw during his brief tenure was completely on the level.
Priebus told Chuck Todd that, contrary to a January New York Times report, he never got the sense that the president wanted to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
“I never felt…that the president was going to fire the special counsel,” Priebus said. Asked by Todd if the president even expressed the desire that Mueller should be fired, Priebus hedged a bit: “I think it was very clear from the president’s own words that he was concerned about the conflict of interests the special counsel had.”
Priebus then said, somewhat confusingly, “I know the difference between ‘Fire that person, why isn’t that person gone?’ to what I read in that New York Times piece.”
When Todd asked him of the story was wrong, Priebus said, “I didn’t think it was right.”
Well, that clears everything up.
Priebus, who has continued to cheerlead the president from the sidelines over the last few months, said that “I never felt that I was involved in something nefarious, the whole way through from the beginning to the end. You can understand the frustration of the president.”
Of course, Priebus’s definition of “nefarious” may vary from the average person’s.
Priebus also claimed, with a straight face, that he still thought the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 was really about Russian adoptions.
Given Priebus’s record of truth-telling on Meet the Press, that statement should be taken with an entire shaker of salt.
