There’s no nice way to put this — when President Obama dismisses MIT professor Jonathan Gruber’s role in constructing Obamacare, he is lying. Federal and state governments paid Gruber nearly $6 million total to build the federal and state versions of the system. Gruber met with Obama and White House officials 19 times over the course of the law’s authoring and passage. Gruber even says that Obama was in the room when the “Cadillac Tax” was created.

In a series of videos that have come out over the past week, Gruber is caught on tape calling the American people who supported Obamacare “stupid,” bragging about exploiting the American people, and bragging that the Obama administration and the Democrats lied in order to get the bill passed.

Steve Rattner was Obama’s chief adviser on the auto industry and headed up the Cash for Clunkers program. He was known as the president’s “car czar.” Rattner told Morning Joe today that any claim that Gruber was not the key person on Obamacare is false.

“The problem is not that Gruber helped them put Obamacare together, because he was the man,” Rattner said. “The problem is what he said in the last two weeks and how the White House has handled it.”

The White House has handled Gruber the same way it usually handles inconvenient facts: with misdirection and transparent lying.

President Obama has dismissed Gruber as “some adviser who never worked on our staff” at the White House. Gruber was the architect of Obamacare. He was an extremely well paid consultant to the Obama White House.

Rattner admitted that on Morning Joe.

“Jonathan Gruber was, back in the day in 2009, the guru on health care,” Rattner said. “I remember that when I was in the White House, he was certainly viewed as an important figure in helping to put Obamacare together.”

“I think if you go back and look at the Washington Post or the New York Times or anything from that period you will find Jonathan Gruber’s name all over it as both someone who’s the leading expert on health care quoted by everybody, and as someone who the White House was using — I don’t think we knew the dollar numbers he was paid at the time.”

Gruber was indeed quoted by President Obama, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other top Democrats who now pretend that he played little or no role in Obamacare’s construction and passage.

Watch Rattner’s admission here.