A couple of things John McCain said at his press conference this morning didn’t pass the smell test.
The first was when he claimed that the then-chairman of the FCC said that it was “more than an appropriate role” for McCain to have sent a letter to the Commission about a pending matter, one that involved a lobbying client of Vicki Iseman’s. Paul Kiel tackles that one at TPMmuckraker.
The other comment from McCain that rang as false was when he said that he had not tried to get The Times to spike the story. He personally may not have, but his campaign staff certainly did, according to a number of reports, including the latest from The New Republic. Its exhaustive backgrounder on the story behind the story describes some of the McCain camp pushback:
From the outset, the Times reporters encountered stiff resistance from the McCain camp. After working on the story for several weeks, Thompson learned that McCain had personally retained Bill Clinton’s former attorney Bob Bennett to defend himself against the Times’ questioning. At the same time, two McCain campaign advisers, Mark Salter and Charlie Black, vigorously pressed the Times reporters to drop the matter. And in early December, McCain himself called Keller to deny the allegations on the record. â¦
“There’s absolutely no story there. And it’d be a mistake for you to write about a non-story that didn’t run,” McCain adviser Charlie Black told me last week. “Drudge shouldn’t have put that up. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing.” â¦
Two members of the McCain team had contacted TNR’s editor to pressure him not to investigate the story. â¦
Let’s be clear. Pushback is normal, and there’s not anything particularly unusual about the pushback that occurred here. But it certainly seems to have occurred, contrary to what McCain suggested at his press conference.
