President Barack Obama viewed the latest jobs numbers Thursday night, before the figures were made available to the public, a White House official told CNN.
But the official would not say if Obama saw them before or after his Thursday night acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention.
In a CNN interview earlier this summer, former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Christina Romer indicated that it's standard practice for the White House to receive economic figures the evening before they are released.
Romer said the president's top economist receives the numbers early because "there's supposed to be one person in the government, you know, I'm supposed to look at them and say, 'Gee, do I need to call the Fed chair? Or do I need to call the Secretary of the Treasury and say, 'This, this is, you know, could have a market implication?'"
Romer went on to say she looked at them before briefing the president.
When the numbers were bad, "you'd have to go over and say, 'I'm sorry, it's another horrible number,'" Romer said.
Alan Kreuger, the current chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, would presumably have had that duty this week.
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