Former Republican House Speaker John Boehner told an audience at a private trade show last week he used to sneak into the White House to meet with President Barack Obama.
"If I didn't sneak in, if I went in like I would normally go in, the right-wing press would go crazy. 'What is Boehner up to?'" Boehner said in videotape of the event reported on by The Washington Post on Tuesday.
"The left-wing press would go just as crazy," Boehner continued. "'What is Obama doing? He's going to let Boehner roll him again.' You're dead before you even have an agreement."
The remarks were recorded Friday by an attendee at ThoughtSpot, hosted by Good Neighbor Pharmacy at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.
Boehner also was critical of the American public's propensity to pick and choose their news sources, something most Republicans have hailed in the wake of what they have complained was a liberal chokehold on the mainstream press.
"What's making everything even worse today is because we have so much news, people get to choose where they get their news," Boehner reportedly said. "It used to be we had three big TV networks, five big newspapers, and five big radio stations and whatever they said was the news. Everybody else followed what they do."
Now, he said, news consumers "go to places that they agree with, reinforcing the divide that we have in the country already."