The Nation has Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) “caught on tape” describing his hopes for the Senate “at a secret meeting of elite donors convened by the Koch brothers.”

The Nation introduced it by comparing it to a Politico interview McConnell gave recently. “What McConnell didn’t tell Politico was that two months ago, he made the same promise to a secret strategy conference of conservative millionaire and billionaire donors hosted by the Koch brothers,” Lauren Windsor writes.

As scoops go, it’s a pretty odd one. The Nation is reporting that Mitch McConnell said the same thing in private that he has already said in public.

The closest they get to an inconsistency is that McConnell mentioned that he wanted to “go after” Democrats on financial-services issues.

“[That’s] a key omission from his Politico interview,” Windsor writes, before noting how McConnell has already made his opposition to Obama’s financial-services policies very clear, in public. “He has been a vocal opponent of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in particular, and presumably under his Senate leadership funding for the CFPB would be high on the list of riders for the appropriations chopping block.”

Secret recordings of politicians’ conversations are fun to write about, but they’re more fun if they’re different from the public interviews the politician gives.