Timothy Geithner, the former secretary of the Treasury Department, says the White House wanted him to lie in scheduled appearances on the Sunday TV talk shows. As Geithner writes in his new memoir:

“I remember during one Roosevelt Room prep session before I appeared on the Sunday shows, I objected when Dan Pfeiffer wanted me to say Social Security didn’t contribute to the deficit. It wasn’t a main driver of our future deficits, but it did contribute. Pfeiffer said the line was a ‘dog whistle’ to the left, a phrase I had never heard before. He had to explain that the phrase was code to the Democratic base, signaling that we intended to protect Social Security.”

Of course, Geithner would not have been the only official from the White House to have misled the American people on the Sunday talk shows. Susan Rice famously came under fire for blaming a terrorist attack on a YouTube video in appearances on the shows.

Excerpt via Mike Allen.

Daniel Halper is author of the forthcoming book Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine.