Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi is denying that Jonathan Gruber was involved in creating Obamacare — or even that she knows of the MIT professor. A 2009 video of the then-majority leader, however, shows otherwise. 

Pelosi dismissed this week’s blow-up over comments made by Gruber, widely seen as one of the chief architects of the health-care law. The professor claimed that the lack of transparency around the law was a good thing, as it allowed its framers to take advantage of “the stupidity of the American voter.”

“I don’t know who he is. He didn’t help write our bill,” she told a reporter on Thursday. “So with all due respect to your question, you have a person who wasn’t writing our bill commenting on what was going on while we were writing the bill, who has withdrawn some of the statements that he made. So let’s put him aside.”

But a C-SPAN video from November 2009, while the Obamacare bill was being debated in a Democratic-controlled Congress, showed Nancy Pelosi specifically praising Gruber’s analysis of the law.  

“I don’t know if you have seen Jonathan Gruber of MIT’s analysis of what the comparison is to the status quo versus what is in our bill,” she told a reporter at the time, explaining that his research demonstrated that Obamacare would reduce health-care costs. Pelosi’s website also referenced Gruber’s work multiple times during debate on the law. 

Pelosi’s office told the Washington Post that the congresswoman meant to say she didn’t know Gruber personally.