Wednesday on CNN, Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) said during a meeting on the tax bill with Senate Democrats, White House economic adviser Gary Cohn faked a bad phone connection to end a call with President Donald Trump
Carper said, “We’d been having about a half-an-hour conversation with Gary, with Marc Short, and with Shahira Knight, three people from the administration. Had a great conversation. They were asking a question of more moderate Democrats trying to see if there was some kind of middle ground on tax reform. About 30 minutes into the meeting Cohn gets up and takes a call on a cell phone. Comes back into the room and says, we have somebody calling in from Asia, and it was the president, which is nice, nice of him to do that, but 15 minutes later, the president is still talking.”
He continued, “I said, ‘Gary, why don’t you do this? Take your cell phone back and just say, Mr. President, you’re brilliant, but we’re losing contact and I think we’re going to lose you now, so good-bye. And that’s what he did, and he hung up, and then we went back to having the kind of conversation that we needed to, where they asked good questions looking for consensus looking for common ground. I think we identified a little bit.”
Berman asked, “Are you saying Gary Cohn faked a bad connection to get the president off the phone?”
Carper said. “Well, I don’t want to throw him under the bus, but yes.”
(h/t WFB)
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