Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, in an interview this week with the Las Vegas Sun’s Jon Ralston, claimed he wasn’t chairman when the Ensign affair took place.
In the interview, Ralston describes Sen. John Ensign’s (R-NV) affair, asking what Steele would do if a Democrat had done the same thing.
“If you were chairman of the Republican party and a Democratic senator had an affair with a staffer, had his parents pay her off, fired both her and her husband who worked for him then tried to get the husband a job, you’d be outraged, wouldn’t you?” Ralston said.
“I don’t know. Who is the individual you’re talking about?” Steele responded.
“The individual happens to be John Ensign,” Ralston said, then called Steele “Mr. Double Standard” for not saying anything about Ensign.
“I wasn’t chairman of the party when all that took place, so I had no opinion on it,” Steele said.
“What are you talking about? It took place last year!” Ralston said.
“I wasn’t chairman of the party,” Steele said again.
Steele isn’t necessarily lying. The actual events of Ensign’s scandal — the affair, the payoff, his mistress’ husband’s lobbying gig — happened in 2007 and 2008, before Steele took the helm of the RNC.
But the affair was revealed in summer of 2009, months after Steele won the chairmanship. (See TPMmuckraker’s handy timeline of the Ensign affair.)
Watch:
The interview sounds a lot like one last week, when Steele claimed he wrote his new book before he was a chairman — even though most of the book couldn’t have been written before 2009.
(H/T Think Progress)
