Former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said Tuesday that he’s not going to sit back and take it if his successor, current RNC chairman Reince Priebus, is “crapping” on his legacy.
“I kept my mouth shut for two years because, hey, I’m a party guy,” Steele said while guest hosting WMAL’s “Mornings on the Mall.” “But you know what, at the end of the day, you say to yourself, they’re dumping on you, they’re crapping on your legacy, they’re giving you crap for stuff that they didn’t want to do in the first place — coalitions, expanding media, social media networks.”
Priebus took a thinly veiled swipe at Steele during the rollout of the RNC’s much-ballyhooed autopsy of the 2012 election, saying that the organization’s credit cards were suspended when he took over as chairman. Steele quickly fired back, pointing out the party’s electoral successes when he was in charge, and on Tuesday he contended that Priebus played a role in the RNC’s fiscal predicament.
“The bottom line: Reince Priebus was my right hand,” Steele said. “I mean, what annoys the heck out of me is that for two years Reince Priebus was in every room I was in, a part of every major decision I made for how much money we would spend, what we would spend that money on, what the priorities of the RNC would be.”
He continued, “And for him to stand up there and pretend as if he wasn’t in the room, that he had no say in the decision-making process, and that the so-called debt that he inherited was the one that — as a member of the RNC, he voted for, No. 1. No. 2, he recommended to me to go into debt. And for him to sit there and act like he had nothing to do with it and that somehow he inherited this mess that he helped create, to me is just pure B.S.”
Steele also criticized the RNC’s autopsy last week by contending that the party’s planned minority outreach is incompatible with the voter ID laws being pushed by a number of prominent GOP leaders, including Priebus.
Listen to Steele’s appearance on WMAL (discussion of his feud with Priebus begins around the 6:20 mark):
h/t The Hill
