Obama’s Teleprompter Stolen
Thieves made off with a van carrying $200K of White House equipment earlier this week.
| Posted Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2011, at 11:45 AM ET
Photo by Stephen Morton/Getty Images.
We’re guessing this is going to leave the men and women of Fox News smiling.
A van carrying President Obama’s teleprompter was stolen from a Virginia hotel parking lot on Monday. An NBC affiliate in Richmond reports that the vehicle – which was also carrying audio equipment, presidential seals and a podium – was recovered later the same day at a different hotel parking lot, although it is not clear whether all of the van’s contents, valued at roughly $200,000, were also recovered.
“No classified or sensitive information was in the vehicle,” the Defense Information System Agency said in a statement Tuesday. “We take incidents such as this very seriously, and a formal investigation is continuing in coordination with relevant law enforcement agencies.”
The van was parked at a hotel outside of Richmond, where it was stationed in advance of a presidential appearance on Wednesday. According to the NBC affiliate, it is not clear if the van was specifically targeted because of its contents or if it was a crime of opportunity.
Obama’s frequent use of a teleprompter has drawn criticism from a number of his conservative critics, some of which have dubbed it the Teleprompter of the United States, or TOTUS. A GOP House freshman floated a proposal earlier this year to defund the teleprompter, although he later scrapped those plans.
In an early version of a Fox News report on the teleprompter theft, the network was quick to note that “President Obama is rarely seen without TOTUS.”
