The White House on Monday dismissed the weekend release of 20,000 emails showing that Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber had frequent contact with the Obama administration, and said the release of those messages was motivated by partisanship.
“If there’s a bombshell included in those emails, it certainly hasn’t gone off,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest asserted, in reference to emails of Gruber’s communications with the White House and the Health and Human Services Department that the Wall Street Journal released.
“Our description of his role in this has been consistent – he did not work at the White House,” Earnest said. He also said the emails didn’t uncover any evidence that people on federal insurance exchanges would not be able to benefit for tax credits.
That’s a reference to an impending Supreme Court case decision that could nullify the tax credits for people who use the federal exchange, and undermine the entire healthcare law. Gruber was caught on video making comments that seemed to support the idea that people on federal exchanges should not get subsidies, a position that the White House is now arguing against.
Those comments from Gruber could be seen by the Supreme Court as evidence that the administration knew the law didn’t allow subsidies to people on the federal exchange, and thus could hurt the administration in the case.
Earnest did not acknowledge the controversy over Gruber’s comments that surfaced in videos last year. Those videos showed Gruber referring to the “stupidity of the American voter” and the “huge political advantage” the healthcare legislation’s lack of transparency provided in getting the bill passed.
The videos caused a media firestorm and forced Obama to distance himself from Gruber. “The fact that some adviser who never worked on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with…is no reflection on the actual process that was run,” Obama said of Gruber’s role at the G20 summit in Australia in November 2014.
Earnest instead tried to keep the focus on the alleged partisan motivations behind the email leaks.
“I recognize that these are emails that were actively leaked by Republicans in the House, Republicans that voted more than 50 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act,” he said. “[T]his is consistent with the kind of game-playing that we’ve seen from Republicans in Congress that doesn’t actually lower healthcare costs or expand access to healthcare.”
