Just to follow up on the Meet the Press debacle in which an aide to Colin Powell tried to cut off the interview before it was completed, it appears that the iron clad rule of the Bush White House — no one can ever be fired for any reason — is still in effect.
Richard Leiby noted today that Emily Miller, the deputy press aide in question, still has the full support of the State Department.
“I think she’s great and she’s doing a good job for us,” Richard Boucher, State’s top spokesman, told us. “Russert went on and on and on. We asked the cameraman to help us cut it off. He did and moved the camera.”
Yet Boucher acknowledged that his office recently had to review whether Miller’s approach has been overly belligerent with the press.
About six weeks ago, Boucher investigated reporters’ complaints about Miller’s conduct during a pool-camera shoot. “There were one or two places where she was too aggressive,” he acknowledged. “We all make mistakes sometimes.”
How generous of him.
Nevertheless, the controversy has cast a spotlight on Miller, who, apparently, has ruffled media feathers on more than one occasion.
In just six months on the job, Miller, 33, who controls access to Powell, seems to have made more enemies than usual among the reporters who cover the State Department. “Her manner is brusque, abrasive, demeaning,” said one, asking to remain anonymous so as not to be frozen out of interviews with Powell. “She’s not doing the secretary a service; she’s doing him a disservice.”
[…]
In 2001 Miller was working as press secretary to then-Majority Whip Tom DeLay when she lashed into Post Magazine writer Peter Perl while he was doing a profile of her boss, screaming: “You lied! . . . You betrayed him! You twisted his words! . . . We don’t know you. You don’t exist. . . . You are dead to us.” A DeLay spokesman told us yesterday, “Tom thinks Emily did a fine job for him.”
Of course he did.