MIKE JOHNSON: “Sir, why did you pause LNG exports? … Liquified natural gas is in great demand by our [European] allies. Why would you do that? Because you understand, we just talked about Ukraine. You understand, you’re fueling Vladimir Putin’s war machine, because they got to get their gas from him, you know.”
And he looked at me, stunned, and he said, “I didn’t do that.”
And I said, “Mr. President, yes you did. It was an executive order, like three weeks ago.”
“I didn’t do that.” And he’s arguing with me.
I said, ”Mr. President, respectfully, can I, could I go out here and ask your secretary to print it out? We’ll read it together. You definitely did that.”
… He said, “No, no. You misunderstand.” He said, “What I did is I signed this thing to —we’re going to conduct a study on the effects of LNG.”
I said, “No, you’re not, sir. You paused it. ... This is doing massive damage to our economy, national security …” It occurred to me, Barry, he was not lying to me. He genuinely did not know what he had signed.
And I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing. Because I thought, we’re in serious trouble. Who is running the country? Like, I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know.
