After ex-FEMA director Michael Brown said on Fox News last night that the Obama administration wanted the oil spill to happen (“This president has never supported big oil, he’s never supported offshore drilling, and now he has an excuse to shut it back down”), White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs offered some retaliation today. At a White House press briefing this afternoon, Fox’s Wendell Goler asked if the Gulf of Mexico oil spill could be thought of as “Obama’s Hurricane Katrina.” And that was all that was needed to set Gibbs off:
” … For those who weren’t let in on the big secret, Mr. Brown … intimated on Fox — and it wasn’t, I will editorially say, didn’t appear to be pushed back on real hard — that this spill was leaked on purpose in order for us to walk back our environmental and drilling decisions, and that the leak that we did on purpose got out of control and now is too big to contain,” Gibbs said. “I’m not entirely sure that a factual answer that I might give to any one of your questions is gonna change the notion that your network put out the former FEMA director to make an accusation that the well had been purposefully set off in order to change an offshore drilling decision.”
