VERIFIED QUOTE · reported 2026-08-24
“He wasn’t named the recovery sidekick. He was named the recovery czar,”
Zeb Smathers · said date not stated · reported 2026-08-24
Smathers said Whatley was named the recovery czar, not the recovery sidekick, and that his leadership and presence has been absent.
This quote was mechanically extracted from the cited article and verified as an exact substring of the source text before publication. Attribution follows the article's own wording.