Following the New York Times’ scoop on George W. Bush’s upcoming memoir, NBC is out tonight with excerpts of an interview Matt Lauer conducted with the former president set to air next week.

Among other things, Bush says the lowest moment of his presidency was when rapper Kanye West declared in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that “Bush doesn’t care about black people.” “That ‘he’s a racist,’ ” Bush told Lauer. “I resent it, it’s not true, and it was one of the most disgusting moments of my presidency.”

Bush writes, per Lauer, that he can barely think about the moment “without feeling disgust” and that it outranks people criticizing him for the war in Iraq or his efforts to cut taxes to benefit the rich.

In the interview, Lauer interjects, telling Bush he’s likely to take “heat” for saying the “worst moment” was not watching the post-Katrina misery in Louisiana but rather when someone insulted him because of that misery. “The misery in

KANYE’S RESPONSE TO THIS BELOW…

Louisiana affected me deeply as well,” Bush told Lauer. “There’s a lot of tough moments in the book. And it was a disgusting moment, pure and simple.”

According to NBC, Bush also reveals that administration officials investigated a terrorist attack at the White House after 9/11 when bio-detectors indicated a potential botulism attack. “We had all been exposed to it … and had we inhaled it, we could easily be dead,” Bush told Lauer.

Officials went so far as to test the air on lab mice. “We kind of chuckled and said, ‘Well, if the mice are feet up, we’re goners. And if they’re feet down, we’re fine,’ ” Bush said.

Investigators ruled the scare eventually as a false alarm.