On Tuesday, Paul Ryan put on his best wallpaper face to speak with reporters about Donald Trump’s ban on refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries. And although he kept his cool while cameras officially rolled, some folks think he may have been caught on a hot mic as he strutted offstage.
At 1:10 above, someone can be heard muttering, “Waste of my f*#king time.”
On Twitter, Drew Hammill (deputy chief of staff to Nancy Pelosi) tweeted and deleted the assertion that Ryan was the muttering culprit. Very quickly, Ryan’s communications director, Mike Ricci, called out Hamill and insisted that Ryan was not the owner of this f-bomb.
Drew, that is not Speaker Ryan. You know better.
— Michael Ricci (@riccimike) January 31, 2017
The Washington Post‘s Dave Weigel theorized that a “bored cameraman” was to blame, and the plot thickened. Or did it?
Yeah, it's surely a bored cameraman.
— David Weigel (@daveweigel) January 31, 2017
Hammill soon relented after Ryan’s chief of communications, Brendan Buck, insisted that his boss is not the f-bomb-dropping type.
.@BrendanBuck tells me that was not his boss. Will take his word for it and I apologized.
— Drew Hammill (@Drew_Hammill) January 31, 2017
So, not Ryan. Still, with the giant clusterf*ck that Trump’s ban has become, it’s not hard to believe that Ryan would be feeling the tedium. He had to trot out and deal with the media after Trump didn’t even consult his top cabinet members before hot-dropping his executive order. One wonders how much the GOP-led Congress knew beforehand, but Ryan told reporters that “we” knew, and everything is fine. Ryan insists that this all about security:
“We were briefed on the contents of it as it was being rolled out. Clearly, none of us want to see people with green cards get implicated in this. And that’s not the goal here. What the president has asked us to focus on, something that we’ve ran on, is we’ve got to secure our border. We have a border security problem, that’s what the physical barrier on the border is all about and we have security concerns given this age of terrorism.”
Before speaking with the press, Ryan reportedly vigorously defended Trump’s ban during a closed-door GOP meeting. He also told lawmakers to “expect protests” as the fight continues. Well, he’s definitely correct on that one.