Despite denials at the time, e-mails show the administration boasted about an attempt to exclude the network from a round-robin interview.
The Obama administration made a deliberate effort to exclude Fox News from a press pool during the height of its war with the network, newly released documents show.
At the time, in the fall of 2009, the administration dismissed the matter as simply a mistake. “There was no plot to exclude Fox News, and they had the same interview that their competitors did. Much ado about absolutely nothing,” the Treasury Department said in a statement. But internal e-mails obtained by the watchdog group Judicial Watch show that the attempted exclusion from an interview with federal pay czar Ken Feinberg was part of a deliberate strategy. The attempt failed when the other networks refused to go along unless Fox was included.
On Oct. 22, 2009, Dag Vega, the White House director of broadcast media, wrote to a Treasury official that “we’d prefer if you skip Fox please.” Deputy White House communications director Jennifer Psaki wrote the official, Jenni LeCompte, and other colleagues about a report by Fox anchor Bret Baier on the network’s exclusion that “brett baier just did a stupid piece on it -- but he is a lunatic.”
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