Tommy Vietor
Tommy Vietor is an American political commentator and podcaster. He was a former spokesperson for President Obama and the United States National Security Council from 2011 to 2013. He is a founder of Crooked Media and co-hosts the podcasts Pod Save America and Pod Save the World. Vietor was raised in Dedham, Massachusetts, and attended Milton Academy. He graduated from Kenyon College in 2002 with a BA in philosophy. While at Kenyon, he played on the men's lacrosse team and was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity.
In 2004, Vietor turned down an offer from the John Kerry presidential campaign in favor of joining Illinois State Senator Barack Obama for his first statewide run. His first job Obama was driving the candidate's press van across rural Illinois. Vietor worked with and learned from Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs during this period. Vietor was deputy press secretary for the Barack Obama Illinois Senate Campaign in 2004, then became press secretary for Senator Obama the following year and press secretary the year after. During Obama's presidential campaign from 2007–2008, he was Iowa's Press Secretary.
Following Obama's victory in the 2008 presidential election, Vietor became the Assistant White House Press Secretary from January 2009 to January 2011; he then served as National Security Spokesman and Special Assistant to the President from January 2011 until March 2013. Vietor left the White House in March 2013, along with Obama's Director of Speechwriting Jon Favreau, to pursue a private sector consulting and screenwriting career. Together, they founded the communications firm Fenway Strategies.
In March 2016, Vietor became a regular co-host of The Ringer's political podcast Keepin' it 1600, along with Favreau and their fellow Obama administration alumni Dan Pfeiffer and Jon Lovett. Shortly after the November 2016 election, Vietor, Lovett, and Favreau decided to pursue podcasting and activism full-time. They founded their own company, Crooked Media, and launched a new podcast, Pod Save America.
In an interview with Recode's Kara Swisher, Vietor explained, "If Hillary [Clinton] had won, we probably would've kept doing this as a hobby... But when she lost, I think we all had this existential crisis, where it didn't feel right to wake up every day and obsess about politics and what's happening in the country and then go to work doing something else."
Along with Ben Rhodes, who served as Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting under President Obama, Vietor also hosts a podcast covering global issues and policy-making decisions called Pod Save the World. The podcast debuted on January 10, 2017. In addition, Vietor hosted a five-part miniseries about the Iowa caucuses called Pod Save America: On the Ground in Iowa. Pineapple Street Studios produced the miniseries.
