Sen. McConnell on push to protect businesses from coronavirus lawsuits
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell discusses a potential fourth coronavirus stimulus relief bill on ‘The Daily Briefing.’
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"The View" co-host Sunny Hostin offered an impassioned defense of former President Barack Obama Tuesday after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., indicated the 44th president left his successor unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic.
"Clearly, the Obama administration did not leave to this administration any kind of game plan for something like this," McConnell said during an interview Monday night with Lara Trump, the president's daughter-in-law. Later in the interview, he seemed to address Obama directly, saying, "you had your shot, you were there for eight years."
"It's definitley not true," Hostin said, referring to McConnell's comments, "and I think we need to start calling these lies what they are because they're lies. The Obama administration left a playbook -- a 69-page playbook. It was a pandemic playbook in pdf form."
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She asserted that the Trump administration "shelved" that plan and "never even read it. They didn't look for it."
"And so," she added, "the suggestion somehow that the Obama administration didn't leave any sort of information for the Trump administration to plan for what happened is just an egregious, egregious lie -- and I'm just really surprised that someone like Mitch McConnell would just say something like that to the American people. It's just a falsehood, it's just a lie."
Hostin appeared to refer to a 69-page document compiled in 2016 by the National Security Council (NSC). According to Politico, which reported on the document in March, the Obama administration created the playbook as a way to prevent a repeat of perceived mistakes by world leaders during the 2014-15 ebola outbreak.
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“We are aware of the document, although it’s quite dated and has been superseded by strategic and operational biodefense policies published since,” a NSC official told Politico at the time. A former U.S. official who served in both the Obama and Trump administrations claimed that the playbook "was thrown onto a shelf" under Trump.
In remarks made public last week, Obama criticized the Trump administration's coronavirus response as an “absolute chaotic disaster” that resulted from a “selfish” and “tribal” mindset.
McConnell responded Monday by describing Obama's criticism as "a little bit classless."
"I think President Obama should have kept his mouth shut," he said, noting how former President George W. Bush declined to criticize Obama after he left office.
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"The tradition that the Bushes set up of not critiquing the president who comes after you is a good tradition," McConnell said.
"View" co-host Joy Behar was irate over McConnell's response.
"Mitch McConnell, to me, is one of the most classless, most unpatriotic, most un-American leader that we have ever seen -- I have ever seen in my lifetime. He goes up against the Constitution on a regular basis ... he declared that he would make sure Obama was a one-term president, remember that? He claimed that he was not impartial in Trump's impeachment. Talk about classless? He is an unpatriotic senator and he needs to be taken out of office in the Fall," she said.
Fox News' Adam Shaw contributed to this report.
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