As the media pitches a huge fit over President-elect Donald Trump dining out at 21 Tuesday night without informing them, Jon Favreau, former speechwriter to President Obama, says Obama did it, too.
And he was wrong.
But some conservative-leaning journos aren’t buying Favreau’s first-hand account. They are insisting that Trump is receiving worse treatment than Obama did when he got elected.
Favreau, now free to speak his mind as he runs the popular podcast “Keepin’ It 1600,” got into a tweeting skirmish with David Harsanyi, a senior editor at The Federalist. (He’s pictured above second from the right.)
Harsanyi went on, telling Favreau, “You should only bother with me if you can provide evidence of your claim. which you can’t.”
Except, of course, Favreau was there. So likely he would have a pretty good institutional memory about it.
Favreau shot back by linking to a 2010 Politico story about Obama. In it, Obama acted like it was no big deal when he blew off the press to attend his daughter’s soccer game.
John Davidson, another journalist at The Federalist and a contributor at NRO, isn’t buying it.
“Point isn’t that Obama didn’t do it or that it wasn’t noted, but that coverage lacked shock/outrage,” he wrote on Twitter.
Harsanyi turned pretty nasty, saying, “He knows what the point is. It’s impossible for partisans to concede anything.”
This is when CNN’s Jake Tapper jumped into the fray.
“Poss. tone is different today because of diff in overall tone of transition coverage,” he wrote.
Harsanyi turned on Tapper with this: “I could only find couple of stories re O slipping press pool in Hawaii — 1 of them w/ jokes.”
Tapper explained, “Also POTUS did it during a vacation season, Trump did it during high profile transition.”