Mitch McConnell’s most recent attempt to sling mud at the Obama administration didn’t work out quite like he had hoped. While appearing on Fox News’ “Special Report” Thursday night, McConnell had to walk back the claim he made earlier in the week that the Obama administration didn’t leave the incoming Trump administration any kind of “game plan” for dealing with a pandemic.
McConnell was pressed by host Bret Baier during a 12-minute segment Thursday. “You said that the previous administration didn’t leave a plan. They pushed back against that,” Baier said.
“I was wrong. They did leave behind a plan. So I clearly made a mistake in that regard,” McConnell admitted in his very brief comment on the matter. “As to whether or not the plan was followed and who is the critic and all the rest, I don’t have any observation about that because I don’t know enough about the details, Bret, to comment on it in any detail.”
Three days before he said he actually doesn’t know enough about the Obama pandemic playbook to comment on it, McConnell declared that perhaps the conservatives who lead the government might have been more prepared for the coronavirus pandemic had the Obama administration provided a pandemic playbook.
“Clearly, the Obama administration did not leave any kind of game plan for something like this,” McConnell said Monday in an interview with Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, on Facebook Live.
That completely false claim was very quickly debunked by numerous members of the Obama administration, including Obama’s Ebola czar, Ronald Klain. Klain tweeted out a picture of the plan, which was titled “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.”
https://twitter.com/RonaldKlain/status/1260234681573937155
In 2017 just before Trump’s inauguration, Obama staffers hosted an exercise with the incoming administration which walked them through various disaster scenarios that could hit in the near future — including three hours on a hypothetical flu pandemic. McConnell’s wife, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, participated in an exercise.
The Trump administration has been in power since Jan. 20, 2017. The first confirmed coronavirus case in the United States came on Jan. 21, 2020.
You can catch McConnell’s retraction in the video embedded up at the top of this article.