The White House said Thursday that a reported exchange between a nameless Republican lawmaker and President Barack Obama during the government shutdown was a “miscommunication.”
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters during a briefing that an anecdote Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) posted to Facebook last weekend, which described how a GOP leader told Obama “I cannot even stand to look at you” during a closed-door meeting with House Republicans, came from a miscommunicated quote.
“What I can tell you was that there was a miscommunication when the White House read out that meeting to Senate Democrats, and we regret the misunderstanding,” he said, clarifying that the quote attributed to a GOP lawmaker in the meeting’s readout was not accurate.
A Huffington Post report suggested Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) learned of the comment from a White House aide and shared it with his caucus. The nameless lawmaker who made the remark, according to the report, was House Rules Committee Chair Pete Sessions (R-TX).
Carney had said previously that the interaction Durbin described “did not happen,” and the incident was also flatly denied by House GOP leaders.
