It was on March 27 that Dana Perino decided that life as stand-in White House Press Secretary wasn’t nearly fun enough if you didn’t just totally make up things from time to time. That’s when she was asked how many White House staffers had used RNC email accounts, and as she later confessed, she “said a handful… (because) I was asked based on something that I didn’t know”.

So now that Tony Snow is slated to return this week, last Thursday Dana Perino couldn’t resist playing one last episode of “let me just make it up and see if anyone notices”.

During yesterday’s press briefing, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino resisted answering any questions about why the administration thought it necessary to give political briefings to appointees at federal agencies, and whose idea it was to hold them.

When one reporter asked Perino whether the briefings were a “White House idea, initially, or was it the agencies,” Perino dodged the question and replied that “the Clinton administration had similar briefings.”

But since most people who served in the Clinton administration are not yet dead, the intrepid bloggers at ThinkProgress (not reporters, mind you) did just a little digging, and came up with:

Perino’s “Clinton did it too” is wrong. Bush White House officials went to federal agencies on at least 20 occasions and conducted private briefings for large groups of political appointees. They gave presentations focusing on “Republican electoral prospects in the last midterm election.” The Hatch Act explicitly prohibits the use of federal property for partisan political purposes.

Doug Sosnik, who served as President Clinton’s Director of Political Affairs and later as Counselor to the President, told ThinkProgress, “We never went to agencies and briefed political appointees.” Sosnik and several other former Clinton administration officials told ThinkProgress that Clinton officials never conducted similar briefings. (emphasis theirs)

Presumably Dana Perino will be looking for a new career in the not too distant future. If anyone has suggestions as to what might be suitable for a pretty young thing with a compulsive need to lie, be nice and email them to her. Or feel free to send them to us, and we’ll pass them along.