Obama Talks Oil Spill, Defends Ken Salazar in New Interview

In a lengthy interview with Jann S. Wenner from Rolling Stone to be published Friday, President Barack Obama defended the job performance of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and rejected the suggestion of comparing Salazar to Tony Hayward, who was fired by BP due to his handling of the oil spill in the Gulf.

Let me ask you about the Gulf oil spill, said Wenner. British Petroleum fired Tony Hayward, so my question is: Why does Interior Secretary Ken Salazar still have his job? The corruption at Minerals Management Service was widely known at the time he came into office, as was reported several times in Rolling Stone and other places, and that's what helped the Gulf disaster to happen.

Obama replied:

When Ken Salazar came in, he said to me, One of my top priorities is cleaning up MMS. It was no secret. You had seen the kind of behavior in that office that was just over the top, and Ken did reform the agency to eliminate those core ethical lapses -- the drugs, the other malfeasance that was reported there. What Ken would admit, and I would admit, and what we both have to take responsibility for, is that we did not fully change the institutional conflicts that were inherent in that office. If you ask why did we not get that done, the very simple answer is that this is a big government with a lot of people, and changing bureaucracies and agencies is a time-consuming process. We just didn't get to it fast enough.

Having said that, the person who was put in charge of MMS was fired. We brought in Michael Bromwich, who by every account is somebody who is serious about cleaning up that agency. We are committed to making sure that that place works the way it is supposed to. But when I have somebody like Ken Salazar, who has been an outstanding public servant, who takes this stuff seriously, who bleeds when he sees what was happening in the Gulf, and had started on a path of reform but just didn't get there as fast on every aspect of it as needed to be, I had to just let him know, You're accountable, you're responsible, I expect you to change it. I have confidence that he can change it, and I think he's in the process of doing so."