Mitch McConnell Walks Back Comments About Obama Admits He Was Wrong

Mitch

Mitch McConnell Walks Back Comments About Obama Admits He Was Wrong

On Thursday Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell retracted comments made earlier last week that the Obama administration didn’t leave behind a “game plan” for a pandemic.

“I was wrong,” McConnell said about his comments during an interview with Fox News.

“They did leave behind a plan. I clearly made a mistake in that regard,” he said.

“As to whether or not the plan was followed and who is the critic and all the rest, I don’t have any observation about that because I don’t know enough about the details of that … to comment on it in any detail,” he added.

These comments come after McConnell seemed to blame the Obama administration for not leaving guidelines behind for the Trump White House during the transition in 2017. President Trump himself has made similar remarks.

“They claim pandemics only happen once every hundred years but what if that’s no longer true? We want to be early, ready for the next one, because clearly the Obama administration did not leave to this administration any kind of game plan for something like this,” McConnell said during a Trump campaign digital event with Lara Trump.

His comments invited backlash from former Obama administration officials.

Ronald Klain, who was the Ebola coordinator for President Obama, tweeted that “we literally left them a 69-page Pandemic Playbook…. that they ignored.”

“And an office called the Pandemic Preparedness Office… that they abolished. And a global monitoring system called PREDICT .. that they cut by 75%” he noted further.

Jeremy Konyndyk, who was the director of USAID’s Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance, told the press that the Trump administration was “extensively briefed” on the plan during the transition.

The Trump White House has repeatedly been slammed in the midst of the coronavirus for a 2018 decision to disband the National Security Council’s global health unit, a decision former national security adviser John Bolton characterized as a “streamlining.”

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