Brownie Watch: New unqualified Bush appointee surprisingly hip!
Jimmy Carter at the Council on Foreign Relations on Israel/Palestine. See the speech here.
Interior Secretary Gale Norton is resigning. Someone close to her tells the Denver Post it has nothing to do with the Abramoff investigation. Don’t believe it.
Most of the corruption around Abramoff was channeled in one fashion or another. She was the secretary from 2001 on. A lot of it touches her.
Ahhh, another headline only CNN could come up with.
This is a headline currently running on the Netscape section of the CNN website. And as you’ll see, it runs the blazing and rather unexpected headline: “Dems Indicted; Clinton, Kerry Targeted.”
Needless to say, no Democrats have been indicted. The headline is for an AP story in which RNC honcho Ken Mehlman ‘indicts’ the Democrats for having no message.
Who’s the headline writer? Yet more of the long steady decline of CNN.
(ed.note: Special note of thanks to TPM Reader MM.)
Birds of a feather?
Katherine Harris’ senate campaign is on the brink of implosion because of her ties to Cunningham-fraudster Mitchell Wade.
Now we find that she sold her house for three times what she paid for it only six years earlier.
People have a lot of meta-theories for the decline in the White House’s poll numbers and management effectiveness. But perhaps the more straightforward explanation is that with so many senior officials being arrested, it just leads to a breakdown in command and control.
As you may have read this evening, White House domestic policy adviser Claude A. Allen, one of the more surreal players in the Bush White House, was arrested this evening and charged with a bizarre retail fraud scheme in which he would buy items from Target or Hecht’s, deposit them in his car and then return to the store with the receipts. Then he’d grab the identical item off the shelf, head to the return desk and ‘return’ the item for a refund.
Here’s the narrative of Allen’s crimes from the statement of the local police department …
On January 2, 2006, a Target store Loss Prevention Manger observed an unknown man enter the store located at 25 Grand Corner Avenue in Gaithersburg. He was observed in the store with an empty Target bag in a shopping cart. The man was then seen selecting merchandise throughout the store and placing items in the Target bag. He put additional items in his cart. The man then went to guest services where he produced a receipt and received a refund for the items he had just selected from the store shelves. After receiving the refund he left the store without paying for the additional merchandise in the shopping cart. He was apprehended by the store employee.
The Target Loss Prevention Manger contacted Montgomery County Police and through the police investigation it was learned that Allen had been receiving refunds in an amount exceeding $5,000 during last year. Some of the fraudulent returns were made at Target stores and some at Hechtâs stores. He would buy items, take them out to his car, and return to the store with the receipt. He would select the same items he had just purchased, and then return them for a refund. Allen is known to have conducted approximately 25 of these types of refunds, having the money credited to his credit cards.
Throughout 2005 he obtained refunds for items ranging from clothing, a Bose theater system, stereo equipment, and photo printer to items valued only at $2.50.
This you’ll remember is the president’s chief advisor on domestic policy issues. Before that President Bush nominated him to be a federal judge.
Actually, one clarification, Allen is the former White House domestic policy adviser. He resigned abruptly one month ago to spend more time with his family, thus, like David Safavian, providing the prescribed Bush administration interval between resignation and arrest.
Claude Allen refund scheme update …
Allen’s lawyer,Mallon Snyder, tells WaPo he’s confident he’ll be able to prove the incidents were “a series of misunderstandings.”
Lotta misunderstandings. More than 25, according to the police.
In any case, with so many high-level felony arrests at the White House one does need to make some effort to categorize them. Most have been crimes of the regime — either tied to specific executive decision-making like the Libby case, or ones that flow from the nature of the operation, as I would argue the Safavian case clearly does.
But this case, at least on its face, seems personal and clinical. An accomplished man, making $160,000 a year making a few grand ripping off radios and photo-printers from the local Target?
That said, Allen always struck me as a very weird dude. I can only imagine the backstory that’s going to emerge on this one.
Ahh, yes, Claude Allen flashback/update …
In the early days of the Katrina Debacle, the White House response was being coordinated by none other than Claude Allen.
Logical choice, of course: get your guy in charge of abstinence education and school prayer policy and banning abortion to run disaster management.
Maybe he was too busy waiting in the return line at Hecht’s to focus on the hurricane stuff.
TPM Reader DK checks in …
The Three Stages of Bush Grief
Political Stage:
“When I heard the story last night I was shocked and my first reaction was one of disappointment, deep disappointment, that, if it’s true, that we were not fully informed.”Faux Sympathy Stage:
“[S]hortly thereafter I felt really sad for the Allen family.”Excuse Stage:
“If the allegations are true, something went wrong in Claude Allen’s
life. And that is really sad.”
Rep. Harold Ford (D-TN) responds to the GOP’s FancyFord.com smear.