The Mistrust List.

Interviewing Dan Pfeiffer (senior Obama adviser) on "Meet the Press" this morning, Chuck Todd put up what I'll call The Mistrust List:

I think one of your challenges though is a trust deficit that has been created over the last 18 months. I want to put up a graphic, whether you believe it's fair or not, it is a fact about all the different sort of government gaps over the last 18 months.

The heading on the graphic was "Trust in Government?" And it had the following bullet points, which I'm displaying here as Todd read them (with all the items, but some extra words):

• Edward Snowden stealing NSA files
• The VA fakes wait times
• IRS losing emails
• Healthcare.gov doesn't launch
• The president himself saying, "U.S. intelligence agencies underestimated ISIS."
• The DHS, the border failure with that surge over the summer, sort of failure, and of course...
• The Secret Service. 

Why should we trust that what you're saying about the CDC is able to handle [ebola]? You understand why there's more skepticism than normal.

On "Fox News Sunday," Chris Wallace teased his panel discussion in a similar (if less hard-hitting) way, premising a question about trust with a list of reasons for mistrust:

[W]ith growing concerns over Ebola, the Secret Service and the VA and IRS scandals, can we trust the federal government to do its job?

Unlike Dan Pfeiffer who could only lamely assert that when there's a problem "we deal with it," George Will was particularly good at leveraging himself off the Mistrust List. I mean, Will was so good that I suspect the teaser was designed to go with the material he had prepared. From the transcript (with emphasis and punctuation added based on the audio):

3 Pinocchios for White House aide's assertion that Republicans "doctored e-mails... to smear the president."

WaPo's Fact Checker Glenn Kessler looks at something Dan Pfeiffer said on 3 Sunday talk shows relating to the development of the talking points that Susan Rice delivered on 5 Sunday talk shows last fall.

[T]he reporters involved have indicated they were told by their sources that these were summaries, taken from notes of e-mails that could not be kept. The fact that slightly different versions of the e-mails were reported by different journalists suggests there were different note-takers as well.

Indeed, Republicans would have been foolish to seriously doctor e-mails that the White House at any moment could have released (and eventually did). Clearly, of course, Republicans would put their own spin on what the e-mails meant, as they did in the House report. Given that the e-mails were almost certain to leak once they were sent to Capitol Hill, it’s a wonder the White House did not proactively release them earlier.

The burden of proof lies with the accuser. Despite Pfeiffer’s claim of political skullduggery, we see little evidence that much was at play here besides imprecise wordsmithing or editing errors by journalists.

"Look, I can't speak to the law here. The law is irrelevant. The activity was outrageous and inexcusable."

The Weekly Standard has this clip of Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer this morning on ABC's "This Week," asked whether the IRS's actions were illegal:



Drudge links to this in a top-left headline reading "Law is irrelevant," which appears above the main headline: "'IRRELEVANT' WHERE OBAMA WAS DURING BENGHAZI," which links to another Weekly Standard clip of Pfeiffer — appearing, also this morning, on "Fox News Sunday" — saying "I don't remember what room the president was in on that night, and that's a largely irrelevant fact":



The double use of the word "irrelevant" seems significant, but let's notice the difference between the 2 usages.

In talking about Benghazi, the interviewer, Chris Wallace, is trying to extract a specific fact about the events, a fact that has not yet come out and that Pfeiffer might know. Pfeiffer blows out a tirade of truly irrelevant verbiage to distract us from the question asked, including the notion that the fact isn't important. Who cares where the physical body of Obama was as long as he was "in touch"?