“One day, something significant will go wrong, and if you mistreat the press and ignore the press, the press will make whatever goes wrong into a bigger explosion than it otherwise would have been,” he said. “Payback is inevitable.”

George W. Bush and his campaign staff treated journalists better than Democrat Al Gore and his staff did, Fleischer said. And when it came out that Gore had claimed to have visited parts of wildfire-ravaged Texas when he had not, reporters were ready to portray it as a reflection of Gore’s honesty and tendency to exaggerate, rather than merely misremembering a detail, Fleischer said.

Eight years later, in contrast, reporters gave presidential candidate Barack Obama a pass on misstatements, like saying there were 57 states, rather than questioning his intelligence, because they liked him and his campaign, Fleischer said.

“It may not matter at this early stage,” he said about the current Clinton campaign, “but it will matter eventually.”