Former Obama spokesman-turned-Amazon exec Jay Carney

Former White House spokesman Jay Carney was in Chicago this week and pulled back the curtains a bit on what it’s like to be a mouthpiece for the president. But as a major executive for Amazon, Carney was coy, at best, about Chicago’s chances of landing the e-commerce behemoth’s second headquarters.

Carney was at a University of Chicago Institute of Politics event Monday and reflected on the evolving relationship between the White House and the press — comparing his time as press secretary to then-President Barack Obama with the often criticized Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ work for President Donald Trump.

But he artfully dodged questions about which city might land Amazon’s next headquarters.

Event host Steve Edwards, vice president and chief content officer at WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR affiliate, and the former executive director of the Institute of Politics, didn’t mind putting Carney on the spot — saying he had just one question: “Is Chicago getting HQ2?”

“Wouldn’t Rahm like to know,” Carney told Edwards and the assembled audience.

Like Carney, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is an alum of the Obama administration. But it didn’t sound like being part of the same fraternity will help Chicago’s shot at HQ2.

Carney, 52, also reflected on his years as a correspondent in Time’s Moscow bureau and eventually as the magazine’s Washington bureau chief. His time on the other side of the podium — and his clear admiration for journalists — did not stop the Obama administration from often going around the press and taking its message public on chummy late night shows and social media.

Although the strategy was criticized by some, Carney said the thinking behind using new media was that the administration had to meet people where they were; some audiences read newspapers, others watch “Between Two Ferns.”

Obama was the first president to have a Twitter handle. But, according to Carney, nothing the former president ever tweeted went out before the team saw it. Trump, on the other hand, is a prolific tweeter — one who doesn’t necessarily have an editor.

In a recent episode of the “The Axe Files” podcast — hosted by current Institute of Politics director David Axelrod, another former Obama administration staffer — Carney said the job of the press secretary has become unrecognizable in Trump’s administration.

“What did you mean by that?” Edwards asked on Monday.

Carney let out a small laugh. “Have you got six hours?”

One piece of advice he was given, he said, was, “Never lie. You don’t have to. Not because you’re morally superior to somebody who might, but because the credibility you have will erode much more quickly — to the detriment of the president, to the White House, to the administration and to the country — if you get caught in an untruth. That doesn’t mean every word I ever said was accurate. But when I found out, or my colleagues found out, after the fact that I had said something that turned out not to be true, unknowingly, we rushed to correct it and were mortified.”

“You obviously put the best spin on a set of facts as you could. You believed, as I did, in the policies that we were putting forward and why they were the right policies. And we made that case — but you didn’t make it up. You wouldn’t, because it would be humiliating when it was so easily discovered that you had.”