McConnell Unsure Whether to Hire FEMA FakerJohn “Pat” Philbin’s choice to fake a FEMA press conference on the California wildfires late last week isn’t looking like the greatest career move.
Before setting up the phony press conference — in which FEMA staffers pretended to be journalists while real journalists on a conference call couldn’t ask fire-related questions — Philbin, FEMA’s press chief, was all set to take a job helming public affairs for the director of national intelligence, Admiral Mike McConnell. McConnell’s credibility has come under attack recently over misstatements concerning surveillance, so Philbin’s arrival at the DNI’s office might have looked a bit fishy. When I asked McConnell’s spokesman, Ross Feinstein, about Philbin, Feinstein commented simply, “We do not discuss internal personnel matters.”
But while today was supposed to be Philbin’s first day, he’s still transitioning from FEMA to the high-secrecy world of the DNI, starting with instruction on how to handle classified information. That process was supposed to consume Philbin’s first day — think of it as an Intel Flack 101 crash course — but now Feinstein tells the AP’s Pam Hess that Philbin might be in bureaucratic limbo a little while longer, if he ever emerges. According to Hess, Philbin’s new job is “on hold” while McConnell reviews Philbin’s record. That doesn’t augur well for the man whose old FEMA online bio page has been speedily expunged from the site.
