Spin Watch: Gibbs Says Obama Didn't Make News on Prosecutions

The White House is trying very hard to convince reporters that President Obama didn’t make news yesterday when he left the door open for possible prosecution of former Bush administration officials who played a role in approving those controversial CIA interrogations. On board Air Force One this morning, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs flat out insisted that what Obama said wasn’t new or surprising and that it had been his policy all along. (Why didn't Rahm know that?) Oddly, Gibbs analogized Obama’s role in the process to what would happen if a reporter were caught defacing AF1. It wouldn’t be the president who would decide the punishment, Gibbs said. It would be someone else. Er, okay. But didn’t Obama make the call to not prosecute the CIA agents who acted on the advice of Bush-era Justice Department officials? Here are the notable excerpts:

MR. GIBBS:  Well, I think what -- maybe what I wasn’t clear about yesterday and -- because what was said yesterday was exactly what the President has said for not just the past week, as we've dealt with these OLC memos, but for the past many months.  Let's just go through the whole sort of decision in general. The President, at the beginning of his administration, banned the use of enhanced interrogation techniques because he believed they were -- they opposed our values and, on balance, they made the country less safe.  As part of an ongoing legal proceeding, the President released these memos because there was no legal justification for continuing to keep them classified; that a lot of the information that was contained in the memos, that the types of techniques were in the public domain.

So that is part of the backdrop of where we are.  The President also believes that the memos and their release should be a moment for us to reflect, but not a moment for retribution. The President, as he said yesterday, has a lot on his plate and he believes that our focus looking forward should be on the crises that we have in the bank industry, in unemployment, the financial sector, and as he and the Attorney General have said, that while no one is above the law, those that worked within the four corners of the legal advice they were given, and those that acted in good faith based on the advice they were provided should not be subject to interrogation.

That's what the President said -- that's what the President has said all along.
 
Q    Should not be subject to what?
 
MR. GIBBS:  Should not be subject to prosecution.
 
Q    The President said yesterday that he wanted to ensure that if there was any kind of investigation, politics were not part of the equation.  Given that, would he be supportive at some point appointing a special prosecutor to look into these Bush-era officials?
 
MR. GIBBS:  Well, look, I think this goes into the -- in some ways, the non-clarity of yesterday.  Let me use an example. If you go in the back of the plane, Air Force One, and spray-paint the walls and smoke in the bathroom, the President isn’t going to determine whether you broke the law; a legal official is going to determine whether you broke the law.  That's the determination that will be made in any instance whereby anybody knowingly breaks the law…

Q    There are lots and lots of news reports today saying that what the President did yesterday was open the door, change his policy, make a surprising announcement.  Are all of those stories just flat wrong?
 
MR. GIBBS:  Yes.  And let me -- again, I'll use the example that I used with Jonathan to you -- I think you were getting a pen or something.  If you spray-paint the back of this plane, if you tear up one of the seats, even though it's Air Force One, the President doesn’t make a determination as to who broke the law.  That's a legal official.  The notion that the President is open to anything is -- I think misses the point.
 
If somebody knowingly broke the law, that's a determination that will be ultimately made by a legal official, not by the President of the United States, or not by anybody else.