Charlie Black, a senior adviser to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign, tells NRO that former McCain aide Nicolle Wallace is peddling “fiction, not only in her new novel, but in what she is saying about Governor Palin.”
Over at the Washington Examiner, Byron York reports that Wallace is claiming, in a new Time interview, that McCain’s team considered bumping Palin from the veep slot. “There certainly were discussions — not for long because of the arc the campaign took — but certainly there were discussions about whether, if McCain were to win, it would be appropriate for her to be sworn in,” Wallace tells the magazine.
Black says that’s nonsense. “Nicolle, like any author, is trying to sell books. This comment to Time, like her book [It’s Classified], is a piece of fiction. There were never any such discussions. At no high level of the campaign was there ever such talk. She’s probably doing this to sell her book.”
“Look, I was with McCain 90 percent of the time. If I wasn’t around, I knew what was happening. And nothing like this happened.” Wallace, he says, “is one of the few dissidents,” one of the “disaffected” staffers who continues to criticize Palin, and “she is inaccurate in doing so.”
UPDATE: My colleague Katrina Trinko reports:
There was no widespread discussion at any point among the McCain campaign staffers of not swearing in Sarah Palin if John McCain was elected president, a senior McCain aide says, contra what Wallace told Time.
“One, I’m not aware of it but that’s not to say she [Wallace] didn’t have that conversation with Steve Schmidt or her husband,” the aide says. “Two, it’s horses***. If they were having that conversation, they were having it in a vacuum and it was irrelevant. Three, it’s really just beyond pathetic that we’re almost three years on from the campaign and she’s got nothing better to do than trash Sarah Palin. It’s just pathetic.”