Fake White House reporters actual questions

MSNBC Transcripts

'Countdown with Keith Olbermann' for Feb. 9

Read the transcript to the 8 p.m. ET show

The White House thought it had a tiny scandal on its hand, a storm in a teapot over the granting of credentials to a writer from an unknown news organization operated by a Texas Republican politician, pseudo reporter, who asked questions of the president and press secretary so softball in nature, that they embarrassed even arch-conservatives. Turns out that was the good news.
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Further editor and publisher also today states that Gannon‘s name turned up on a list of reporters who federal prosecutors wanted to question in the leaking of the identity of the covert operative Valley Plame, the wife of former ambassador Joe Wilson.
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First you heard his questions described as softballs and sounding like plants. Better we let you judge for yourself with videotape of some of the actual questions at the actual White House news conferences, from Jeff Gannon, formerly of Talon News and formerly Jeff Gannon.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SCOTT MCCLELLAN, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Go ahead, Jeff.

JEFF GANNON, TALON NEWS: In your denunciations of the Abu Ghraib photographs, you‘ve used words like sickening disgusting and reprehensible. Will have any adjective left to adequately describe the pictures from Saddam Hussein‘s rape rooms and torture chambers? And will Americans ever see those images?

MCCLELLAN: I‘m glad you brought that up, Jeff, because...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MCCLELLAN: Go ahead, Jeff.

GANNON: Doesn‘t Joe Wilson owe the president and America an apology for his deception and own intelligence failure?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MCCLELLAN: Go ahead, Jeff.

GANNON: Why hasn‘t the administration made more of the U.N. inspectors‘ report that says Saddam Hussein was dismantling his missile and WMD sites before and during the war?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MCCLELLAN: Go ahead, Jeff.

GANNON: I would like to comment on the angry mob that sounded Karl Rove‘s house on Sunday.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MCCLELLAN: Jeff, go ahead.

GANNON: Thank you. With all the reaching out that‘s going on around here, the president said Thursday in his press conference that he was reaching out to the Press Corps. What did he mean by that and why would he will feel the need to reach out to a group of supposedly nonpartisan people?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GANNON: The Welfare Reform Act comes up this year for renewal, does the president supporting effort to insert meaningful work requirements in the bill where today there is none?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MCCLELLAN: Go ahead, Jeff.

GANNON: Since there‘s been so many questions about what the president was doing over 30-years-ago, what is it that he did after his honorable discharge from the national guard? Did he make speeches along side Jane Fonda did denouncing America‘s racist war in Vietnam? Did he testify before Congress that American troops committed war crimes in Vietnam? And did he throw somebody else‘s medals at the White House to protest a war that American was still fighting? What was he doing after his...

MCCLELLAN: I heard what you‘re saying.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Yes, sir.

GANNON: Thank you. Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy, Harry Reid was talking about soup lines and Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet, in the same breath, they say Social Security is rock solid and there‘s no crisis. How are you going to working with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

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