Timothy Geithner Admits White House Told Him to Lie to Media, Charlie Rose Spends an Entire Hour Avoiding the Topic
Charlie Rose invited Timothy Geithner on for the entire hour on his PBS show to plug his new memoir but never once asked him about the juiciest nugget in the book - that the White House told Geithner to lie to the media.
On Monday’s edition of PBS’s Charlie Rose show, the CBS This Morning co-host never got around to asking the former Treasury Secretary about his revelation that White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer pressured him to lie to the likes of Rose’s CBS colleague, Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer.
In Stress Test Geithner revealed that the White House wanted him to lie on the Sunday roundtable shows:
“I remember during one Roosevelt Room prep session before I appeared on the Sunday shows, I objected when Dan Pfeiffer wanted me to say Social Security didn’t contribute to the deficit. It wasn’t a main driver of our future deficits, but it did contribute. Pfeiffer said the line was a ‘dog whistle’ to the left, a phrase I had never heard before. He had to explain that the phrase was code to the Democratic base, signaling that we intended to protect Social Security.”
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While Rose didn’t ask about Pfeiffer pushing Geithner to be less than honest he did toss this softball Geithner’s way on the May 12 show: “President Obama. He wrote you, I think at some point in 2013 when you were leaving, and basically said, ‘Alexander Hamilton would be proud.’ Am I right about that?”
— Geoffrey Dickens is Deputy Research Director at the Media Research Center. Follow Geoffrey Dickens on Twitter.
