President Obama’s chief of staff says actor Sean Penn’s interview with Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán poses a lot of “interesting questions.”
{mosads}Denis McDonough said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that he hadn’t read the interview in Rolling Stone magazine but was familiar with it.
“[It] poses a lot of very interesting questions, both for him and for others involved in this … so-called interview,” McDonough said.
The chief of staff added on ABC’s “This Week” that he was “appalled” by Guzmán’s comments.
“I was appalled by his bragging … about an epidemic that’s sweeping this country on heroin addiction,” he told George Stephanopoulous. “I was appalled by his bragging to the interviewers in Rolling Stone that he moves more heroin than anyone in the world.”
McDonough said the United States would let Mexico handle a possible investigation into the interview.
“We’ll let somebody else sort out what Sean Penn did and didn’t do,” he said. “El Chapo’s where he should be.”
Penn secretly interviewed Guzmán for Rolling Stone after he escaped from a Mexican prison last summer and evaded capture for months.
Guzmán was recaptured Friday.