The magazine The New Yorker decided to have some fun at the president’s expense Wednesday, publishing a satirical article in which the president requests that everyone copy him on their email correspondences in the event another scandal breaks under his watch.
The article even goes so far as to suggest that the president told them to put Post-it notes on their computers that read ‘CC POTUS’ as a reminder.
“Look, I know a lot of you think I’m really busy and you don’t want to bother me,” the President reportedly told his staff in an Oval Office meeting, according to the article. “But cc me anyway. It’s good for me to keep up on what’s going on around here.”
“It’s not good when I turn on the news and they’re talking about something at the White House and I’m like, whoa, when did that happen?” the president added. “I think cc’ing me would go a long way toward fixing that.”
Yet, according to the article, the president’s staff didn’t seem to follow through on the directive when an email with the subject line “Things the Treasury Dept. Is Planning to Do” never reached his inbox.
“Look, maybe I didn’t make myself clear,” the article has Obama telling his staff upon the discovery of the email. “That’s just the kind of thing I should have been cc’d on. Even Biden got that one. Could one of you please forward it to me?”
The lack of communication among senior staffers in the Obama administration became blatantly clear over the past few weeks through the revelation of several different scandals, including the editing of the Benghazi attack talking points to cover up terrorism references, the Internal Revenue Service improperly targeting conservative organizations and the Justice Department illegally subpoenaing the records of several Associated Press journalists and editors.
Obama has previously been quoted as saying he ‘didn’t know anything about’ the leaked Inspector General report of the IRS scandal in which the agency targeted conservatives, despite his counsel being informed of the audit weeks before. The President also supposedly only became aware that the Justice Department issued a subpoena for Associated Press journalists’ phone records at the same time as the public – when the news surfaced in the media last week.
