McCain’s Lawyer: Press Never Mentioned Worst McCain Stories

Via Jed L., we find a McCain campaign spokesperson confirming to The Politico what we already knew — namely, that the press pretty much coddled John Sidney McCain III by keeping the very worst stories about him under wraps and out of the public eye:

John McCain’s press shop and legal teams spent a lot of time answering questions about –- and preparing to rebut –- exposes that never ran, according to the campaign’s top lawyer, Trevor Potter.

“I could walk into our communications director’s office on any one day and there would be six or seven truly horrific stories sort of bubbling away on the stove,” Potter said Thursday morning during a panel discussion hosted by the University of California Washington Center.

“This journalistic entity was doing an expose on Cindy McCain. This journalistic entity was doing an expose on John McCain’s military record in Florida in the 1960s. On they went,” Potter continued. “Most of them probably never turned into anything,” he said, but they still took a lot of time to vet.

“That meant they were a problem for the legal office,” he said, partly because the lawyers had to pick up some of the slack when financial pressures forced McCain to pare down his press staff last summer, but also because the inquiries required some serious due diligence.

The legal team had “to investigate, assemble facts, put it down on paper, brief staff on what was happening -– the sort of things that law firms would do in an investigation,” Potter said.

After the session, Potter wouldn’t tell Politico which media outlets made the most inquiries about exposes that never ran or what subjects they covered.

“I really have no comment beyond what I said publicly,” he said.

This needs to be broadcast far and wide, to put stake through the heart of Mark Halperin’s plans to excuse his intended ramping up of negative stories on Obama by pretending that the press had been nice as pie to Obama and very mean to McCain, when in fact the exact opposite situation obtained.