Steve Schmidt: Palin's knocks on me are "total fiction"

Excerpts obtained by The Huffington Post characterize Schmidt in an unfavorable light, particularly in reference to the prank phone call Palin received from someone pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy. “Right away, the phones started ringing,” Palin writes. “One of the first calls was Schmidt, and the force of his screaming blew my hair back. ‘How can anyone be so stupid?! Why would the president of France call a vice presidential candidate a few days out?!'”

In a telephone conversation with CNN’s John King, Schmidt said how he is described and portrayed in the book is “fanciful. [And] total fiction.”

In the excerpts, Palin also claims Schmidt tried to put her on a strict eating regimen, and in a conversation with Randy Scheunemann, a McCain foreign policy adviser, he had blamed the campaigns problems on Palin’s “postpartum depression.”