The Kerik debacle

Watching the wheels not merely fall but fly off Bush's nomination of Bernard Kerik for Secretary of Homeland Security has been a real hoot for me in many ways, and in others it saddens me because of what I feel it reveals about Bush's administration.

Kerik's record

I know that about three weeks ago I got semi-self righteous saying to expect detailed analysis and documented sources from my posts, but in this particular instance I am being a little lazy. Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo has just about all the depth and documentation on this matter that one could want, and I figured I wouldn't try to reinvent the wheel. First check out his archives from the week of December 5-11. Josh began his coverage by examining Kerik's rather brief stint in Iraq and wondering what was up with that. He was hoping that some Senators would find their gonads long enough to ask Kerik about that...O.K., he was just expressing a desire for Kerik to be questioned on that matter, and after reading his posts, I was hoping that some Senators would have the balls to ask. Just when that part of the story really started getting some legs, BOOM, Kerik withdraws, and then all the other shit starts hitting the fan. Check out Josh's posts for this week for the details and the links.

As for just what was "all the other shit," Josh provided a nice initial summary in one of his December 11 posts:

As nearly as I can tell, almost every major assignment Kerik has had turns out to have been hazed over with clouds of scandal. At the posting in Saudi Arabia he is, it seems credibly, accused of pursuing his boss's private agenda and spying on the boss's many paramours on his behalf.

Then on Kerik's watch, Riker's Island turned into a latter-day GOP Tammany Hall, with punishment meted out to employees who didn't do off-duty work for Republicans. At the NYPD there were reportedly other problems. And then you've got the Baghdad bug-out after that.

And then you've got the 9/11-based security rainmaking with Rudy, though perhaps that's considered an advantage since he could work better at DHS with former employers.

(links provided by Josh Marshall). The last excerpted paragraph raises an issue that was examined further by Newsday,

Since his nomination, much of the attention about Kerik has focused on potential conflicts of interest between his proposed role as the nation's security chief and the expansive business ventures of Giuliani Partners, a firm set up to invest and guide businesses concerned with security in the post-9/11 economy, including those seeking contracts with the Department of Homeland Security.

*******

"This is our worst fear," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. "Membership in these appointed panels is providing an inappropriate and unfair insight for friends and business partners about where the government is going to use its resources. That's a ticket to the most prized information."

And then there's Kerik's questionable purchases for the NYPD. Newsday also covered this issue, detailing a contract for the purchase of stab-resistant vests which was not put out for bid in violation of City procedures, the purchase of batons which allegedly did not meet NYPD standards, and the procurement of security doors from a company with which Kerik might have ties. The New York Post had a story on the security doors. The owner of that company has pled guilty to to submitting inflated and excessive invoices to the city under various contracts.

Josh Marshall also included the following excerpt from the Washington Post:

In the vetting process, which was conducted by the office of White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, Kerik also never mentioned that a New Jersey judge had issued a warrant for his arrest in 1998 over a civil dispute over unpaid bills, the sources said.

But wait--there's more, including possible connections to the mob and multiple extra-marital affairs, AND then, according to another Newsday report, there is a possibility that Kerik married his second wife while he was still married to his first wife. There are many more issues details to be found at TPM, so feel free to go there. You can also check the websites for all the New York papers. Believe me, I have only scratched the surface here.

Wow--with all that real and potential scandal flying about, it's no wonder that Kerik withdrew from his nomination, right? Well, here's the funny thing...the only reason anyone has given for Kerik's withdrawal is not any of the matters listed above. The sole reason given by Kerik and everyone at the White House is that Kerik had a nanny who might have been an illegal alien for whom he did not pay taxes.

What in the wide, Wide World of Sports is a-goin' on here?

• Overview
  

It is with a tip of the hat to Mel Brooks and the late, great Slim Pickens that I ask this question. Here's another piece of information from the Washington Post article referenced above:

The existence of the dispute (over unpaid bills) was first reported by Newsweek Friday night. It is unclear why White House lawyers could not uncover a warrant that Newsweek discovered after a few days of research, although some are blaming Bush's insistence on speed and secrecy for failing to catch this and other potential red flags in Kerik's background.

(emphasis added). The Newsweek article is here. How in the world did the White House not find out about these matters before the press did? I find it incomprehensible that the White House was unaware of these matters in Kerik's past. But hey, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the White House vetting process just missed this--and all the other info on Kerik's past.

Not bloody likely.

• The vetting process, as described by the White House
  

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan made two series of statements about Kerik's vetting process. The first to which I refer is the press briefing on the afternoon of December 13. Here's a summary: 1) the White House has a thorough vetting process in place. 2) That process includes a lot of independent research. 3) The nanny issue became clearer for Kerik in the week leading up to his withdrawal, and he felt he should have informed the White House of it sooner. 4) The nanny issue is the only one given by Scotty as the reason for Kerik deciding to end his nomination. 5) Kerik, not the White House, decided to end the nomination. 6) The vetting process was not rushed because it had been going on for several weeks. In case you doubt my summarizing skills, here's some of the transcript:

We have a thorough vetting process in place. It's a process that looks closely at a candidate's professional, personal and financial background. And based on our solid record on nominations, we remain confident in that process.

*******

David, when you go through the vetting process you do a lot of independent research yourself. You also look to the candidate to provide you with the information you need to complete that vetting process.

*******

This was a matter, in terms of his nomination, this matter relating to the nanny came to his attention more clearly last week and he indicated he should have brought it to our attention sooner. This matter is now an issue that is closed, as far as we're concerned. We're looking forward on who the new nominee will be for the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Q: As far as you're concerned, though, there was only this one issue that disqualified him?

MR. McCLELLAN: It was his decision to withdraw himself. We were moving forward --

Q: Right, I understand that. But there was nothing else that you're aware of that would have affected his --

MR. McCLELLAN: We were moving forward with the nomination process when this issue was brought to our attention by Commissioner Kerik, and it was his decision to withdraw his name from consideration.

*******

Q: Tell us something about the vetting process. Had Kerik answered written questions prior to the announcement?

MR. McCLELLAN: There's a lot of information that candidates provide to us. There's a lot of questions asked to nominees. I'm not going to get into any specific details regarding an individual nominee, because we want to be respectful of those individuals, and be respectful of the process that we have in place. But it is a thorough vetting process that we go through.

Q: Well, can you give us some kind of time line? When was Kerik told he was under serious consideration? How long did the vetting process go along? We're getting the impression that it all happened pretty quickly.

MR. McCLELLAN: That would be an inaccurate impression if you have that, because this was something that was a matter of weeks, not days, that we were going through this vetting process.

Scotty-boy went into more detail earlier on December 13 at a press gaggle. Odd thing...I got the transcript of the gaggle from Talking Points Memo, for it does not appear on the White House web site. Anyhoo, check out what McClellan said, paying particular attention to the emphasized portions:

In terms -- I'm not going to -- I think out of respect for individuals involved in the vetting process, I'm not going to go into any specific issues relating to nominations. But there -- we have a thorough vetting process that candidates go through before the President makes an announcement that he intends to nominate someone. That vetting process continues after the announcement is made that the President intends to nominate an individual.

There are some -- there's a clearance process, more detailed clearance forms that have to be filled out, financial disclosure forms, security clearances, and things of that nature. But our vetting process looks at all the issues related to a potential nominee's personal, professional, and financial background. And we did so in this instance, as well.

*******

But I'll be glad to talk to you about the overall vetting process, because it is a thorough vetting process -- and it was in this instance, as well. And as I indicated Friday, when some of the questions were asked about financial issues -- I think Taser -- I said those were all issues that we looked at.

Q: And you're confident that your vetting process is not improvable? Because I raised questions with you last week, and you insisted then he'd been thoroughly vetted.

McCLELLAN: And he had. Now, when you go through the vetting process -- let me just walk you through it for a little bit. There's the -- when a person is a candidate to be a nominee for a particular position, we do a thorough review of that candidate's personal, professional and financial background. We do independent -- we go to independent sources. We look at the public records that are available. Lawyers in our Counsel's Office also spend time visiting with the potential candidate, and going through questions with that particular candidate.

And in that process, we rely, to some degree, on that candidate to provide us with all the information we need to complete that part of the -- that phase of the vetting process. And then when the decision is made to move forward with announcing the intent to nominate, that individual will fill out more detailed security and financial clearance forms. And then when that's complete, the full FBI field investigation can begin.

(emphasis added). Take another look at the emphasized portions and try to tell yourself that the White House's "thorough vetting process"--which was carried out in Kerik's case--failed to reveal any of the less than stellar elements of Kerik's past. To jump ahead a bit, I have to say that if this oh so thorough process failed to discover any of things, the people conducting the vetting are at best supremely incompetent. More on that later...For now let's get back to the McClellan press gaggle. Here's an interesting exchange:

Q: So none of this other stuff involving interstate or gifts that may have been received as police commissioner -- none of that raised a red flag during the vetting process? The Taser --

McCLELLAN: John, I think Mayor Giuliani pointed out, himself, that -- well, first of all, that the reason the President announced his intention to nominate him is because he is someone who has done a very outstanding job at the head of the Riker Corrections facility, as the head of the New York Police Department, and someone who is strongly committed to helping us win the war on terrorism and protect the American people here at home. He was the -- one of the first ones on the scene at Ground Zero and he was overseeing the response and recovery efforts. And I think Mayor Giuliani pointed out some of this. He enjoyed strong support from Senator Clinton, Senator Schumer, and Mayor Giuliani, people who knew him best.

Q: Right. But --

McCLELLAN: No, we look at -- that's why I said, the vetting process is a thorough one; we look at all the issues related to a potential nominee's background. That includes the financial aspects, the professional aspects and the personal aspects. And the decision to withdraw was his decision.

Q: Right. But you're saying that during the vetting process, there was nothing that came to your attention before --

McCLELLAN: Again, I'm not going to get into specific details of any individual nominee's vetting process. I think that's out of respect for the process. But we were moving forward with the nomination, and this information was brought to our attention and he made a decision to withdraw his name. And that's where it stands. Now we will move forward quickly to name a new nominee.

(emphasis added). This is classic McClellan--get a straightforward yet uncomfortable question and deflect the focus to something that has nothing to do with the question. Notice how the question was asked about whether "this other stuff" raised a red flag and McClellan pointed that Kerik was basically a 9-11 hero and that's why he was nominated. That has absolutely nothing to do with the question! And when the reporter tried to get McClellan back on the actual question, Scotty stresses that the decision to end the nomination was Kerik's and was based solely on the nanny issue. Again, that has nothing to do with the question, for the reporter was asking all the issues other than the nanny issue.

And then McClellan continued this pattern:

Q: Scott, Mr. Kerik said that when he was finally filling out some of those detailed forms, that's when it dawned on him that he might have a problem.

McCLELLAN: That's right.

Q: Would it be better, in the vetting process, to have that filled out beforehand, before he is nominated?

McCLELLAN: Well, I pointed out that they go through an awful -- they go through a pretty thorough vetting process in the initial phase. He did, and this -- I would point out to you that if you look at the nominations we have made, which I think are well over a thousand, less than -- well less than 1 percent have had to withdraw their nomination. I know Linda Chavez during the transition into the first term did, and then you have Commissioner Kerik. And I think that's -- it's a pretty solid record.

The diversionary tactic here was to discuss other nominations and try to convince people that because almost every other nomination had been successful, the vetting process worked just fine in Kerik's case as well. Yeah, right.

Go back and review all of McClellan's statements. One could reasonably conclude the White House spent several weeks investigating all aspects of Kerik's background--utilizing far more than information provided by Kerik--and found nothing which caused concern.

• A follow up report on the vetting process

On December 13, the New York Times published an article by David Sanger entitled "White House Says Its Review of Nominee Was Thorough."

Senior administration officials on Sunday defended the White House review of Bernard B. Kerik's background before his nomination as secretary of homeland security. One official said that even "controversial" material uncovered in a weeklong review had not appeared to endanger Mr. Kerik's confirmation.

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Administration officials seemed eager on Sunday to dispel any notion that Mr. Gonzales's office short-circuited the process in the case of Mr. Kerik or was not alert to potential problems in his background. They described a vetting process more intense than usual before a presidential nomination, asserting that Mr. Kerik brought his troubles on himself by failing to flag the issue of his housekeeper despite repeated questioning on the subject.

*******

But one official said that the White House spent "more time than most" with Mr. Kerik "because he was someone with a colorful background, and there was a good deal in the public domain - much of it favorable, some of it controversial."

(emphasis added). From this one could reasonably conclude that whatever the vetting process revealed other than the nanny issue did not cause any concern for the White House. However, the article does not explain what the White House discovered. The "administration officials" "declined to go into detail about questionable issues they had reviewed involving Mr. Kerik's past, saying that would violate his privacy."

• The possibilities

From the foregoing, there are at least three possible conclusions:

1) The nanny issue is really why Kerik's nomination ended.
2) The White House did not find out about the other shady aspects of Kerik's past.
3) The White House did find out about those other aspects of Kerik's past and wanted him anyway.

Each of these possibilities are discussed below.

Possibility 1: The nanny issue is really why Kerik's nomination ended.

I find this possibility highly unlikely for two reasons. First, of all the actual and alleged aspects of Kerik's past, the nanny issue seems inconsequential. On one side of the scale there is an illegal alien nanny. On the other side of the scale we have the following: two extramarital affairs, the possibility that he was still married to one wife when he married the next, possible mob connections, a suit for failure to pay his bills and an arrest warrant related thereto, conflicts of interest, violation of City purchasing procedures, buying security doors from a company that overbilled NYC on contracts, and on and on. And an illegal alien nanny outweighed all of the other matters combined? Give me a freakin' break.

The second reason why this possibility is unlikely is that there might not even be a nanny. On December 16, the New York Times ran an article which basically said there has been no objective tangible evidence that Kerik ever had a nanny. Kerik's attorney said, "I know she's not a phantom, because a document was applied for and received." However, the document has not been produced, and the lawyer also admitted "I never met her. I don't know what country she came from. I don't know her nationality. I don't know her name." One of Kerik's neighbors said she had seen "a woman she believed to be the nanny playing ball with the two Kerik children in a side yard;" however the neighbor also said she had never met the woman or knew where she came from. Here's more from the article:

Last night, Mr. Kerik was told that skeptics in city government circles were questioning the very existence of the nanny, and he was pressed to provide any kind of evidence to document that she was real. But after taking time to consider the request, Mr. Kerik again decided to remain silent on the subject.

Most puzzled about the nanny, perhaps, are former neighbors of the Keriks and their kin. In the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where the family lived in a first-floor apartment for years before moving last year into the Franklin Lakes home they had extensively renovated, neighbors did not recall any household help. One neighbor, Dennis Doyle, noted that Mr. Kerik's wife, Hala Matli Kerik, a former dental hygienist, not only seemed to care for Celine, now 4, by herself, but that she did her own laundry as well.

In the blue-collar neighborhood of Elmwood Park, N.J., where Mrs. Kerik's mother, Zakia, lived in a rented duplex for years, neighbors reacted with surprise to questions about a nanny, and said that Mrs. Kerik's mother had moved into the Kerik home about a year ago.

"They never came around here with a nanny," said Sophie Borsuk, 55, the longtime landlady and downstairs neighbor of Mrs. Kerik's mother. "I never saw any nanny. This is the first time I heard about a nanny."

As Josh Marshall says, "It's hard to read the Times story and not conclude that the whole nanny thing was a con."

Possibility 2: The White House did not find out about the other shady aspects of Kerik's past.

And pigs can fly. I have two basic reasons why I believe Possibility 2 is not possible. Here's reason one...The White House ultimately controls most of the means of gathering information and data available to the federal government, and the federal government has even more power in that regard due to the Patriot Act. Moreover, the White House spent weeks vetting Kerik prior to his nomination, paid special attention to this vetting. And yet the White House failed to find any of this information about Kerik when the media did so easily? If that is true, then not only will pigs fly, but moneys will also fly--out of my butt.

The second reason is that anyone could have found much of this information via web search engines such as Google or Yahoo and Lexis/Nexis. As the December 13 New York Times article noted, "In Mr. Kerik's case, even the most rudimentary search brings up a wealth of information."

Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that the White House did not find any of the negative information about Kerik outside the nanny issue. That means that the people running the vetting process--including the nominee for Attorney General--are complete incompetents.

Possibility 3: The White House did find out about those other aspects of Kerik's past and wanted him anyway.

To quote Sherlock Holmes, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." As far as I am concerned, Possibilities 1 and 2 are quite impossible (unless everyone in the White House is just plain stupid), so why in the (wide, wide) world (of sports) would Bush want to have Kerik in charge of Homeland Security? Remember, this is the President and Republican party that are all about values, and yet someone with Kerik's history of infidelity, possible organized crime connections, and lawsuits for failing to pay his bills passes muster? How could this be?

The answer lies in part in the Department of Homeland Security itself, or more specifically in the legislation that created it . Quick--just what does the Department of Homeland Security do? What does the DHS Secretary do? Just what did Tom Ridge do in the office? You see, folks, the Homeland Security Act's major effect was NOT the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Instead, the primary, overarching effect of that legislation was a massive reorganization of the federal bureaucracy. This is really a subject for a series of posts, so I will not go into detail now. Here's the bottom line for me: DHS is not a clearly defined agency, so it can be molded into whatever, the President wants it to be. I think that DHS was always intended to be a bit of a smokescreen which could be used to cover any activity the President wanted to undertake. For instance, other agencies--such as the FBI and CIA could be doing one thing while public focus could be shifted to DHS, or vice versa.

This is where Kerik fits--or would have fit--in. Kerik was basically an attack dog, a hatchet man, who would do whatever his master told him to do. And I'm talking about doing his master's "dirty work." The amorphous nature of DHS would allow him to do this more easily, particularly when the Patriot Act is added to the mix. And then there was Kerik's public image as a 9-11 hero. You criticize or question Kerik, you attack a hero of 9-11, which means you hate freedom and are practically a terrorist your own self. And if Kerik ever thought about refusing an order, the White House could force him to comply with threats of exposing his dirty laundry, or if they needed to get rid of him, they could do so easily by exposing his dirty laundry.

That's why the White House didn't care about Kerik's past.

Conclusion

I began this post by saying that "Watching the wheels not merely fall but fly off Bush's nomination of Bernard Kerik for Secretary of Homeland Security has been a real hoot for me in many ways, and in others it saddens me because of what I feel it reveals about Bush's administration."

Here's what it reveals about the Bush administration. They are either stupid and incompetent, or they are liars, or they are hypocrites. All of those alternatives are frightening enough, but the real dangers follow if Possibility 3 is true. That would show that the Bush administration is willing to use any means to accomplish its agenda, and that agenda includes manipulating and going outside the law and civil liberties. Now that's scary stuff.