They haven’t yet announced that he changed his mind because he wanted to spend more time with his family — and hopefully the press conference that deals with the issue will be real — but there seem to have been consequences in the case of the fake FEMA news conference:
Pat Philbin, FEMA’s external affairs director, was scheduled to become director of public affairs for National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell on Monday. It was not immediately clear whether he offered his resignation or was fired just as he was set to begin the job.
As of Sunday, officials only said that they were aware of concerns.
But Monday, the director of national intelligence office issued this statement: “We do not normally comment on personnel matters. However, we can confirm that Mr. Philbin is not, nor is he scheduled to be, the director of public affairs for the office of the director of national intelligence.”
FEMA Director David Paulison said Philbin sent him an e-mail in which he took full responsibility for last week’s staging of the news conference.
The irony in all of this that FEMA was generally getting good reviews for its job performance here in California in contrast to its performance during Hurricane Katrina.
On the other hand, that wouldn’t be difficult to do.
Meanwhile, Philibin asserted today that the press conference had really been one, big, fat mistake and really not intentional deception:
John “Pat” Philbin, the now former director of external affairs for FEMA, told CBS News that he should have stopped the press conference that the agency held last week without any media present.
“I should have cancelled it quickly. I did not have good situational awareness of what was happening,†he told CBS News in a telephone interview.
Philbin himself was heard off-camera asking Vice Admiral Harvey Johnson, his boss, a question. He now says he feels terrible about what happened adding that the FEMA press office was under considerable pressure to get information on the California fires out to the press and was working on little sleep.
“I can definitively tell you that there were no discussions or conversations about setting up a fake news conference.â€
Philbin said that Adm. Johnson, the second-in-command at the agency, did not realize it was FEMA staffers and not reporters who were asking questions, despite the fact that Johnson called on members of the FEMA staff by name during the press conference.
“I am not aware that he knew what was happening and all of sudden staff were asking questions,†Philbin said. “When the staff began asking questions I should have intervened and I didn’t.â€
How bad — and d-u-m-b — was the fake press conference? So bad that Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff was sounding almost like a blogger:
Seldom does anyone in government come as clean as Michael Chertoff, secretary of Homeland Security, has come with his disdain for his own agency’s stunt.
“”I think it was one of the dumbest and most inappropriate things I’ve seen since I’ve been in government,” Chertoff said yesterday.
And just so the (real) press listening to him understood, he added this:
“”I have made unambiguously clear, in Anglo-Saxon prose, that it is not to ever happen again and there will be appropriate disciplinary action taken against those people who exhibited what I regard as extraordinarily poor judgment,’’ Chertoff said. “There will be appropriate discipline.’’
And, indeed, this truly seems to have been an event — intentional or inadvertent — that turned out to be so stupefyingly clumsy and self-defeating that it’s clear the consternation at the higher levels of the Bush administration is real.
Read our original post on the press conference here.
UPDATE: Read Ed Morrissey.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.