Over the course of two terms, the Bush White House’s efforts to maintain an impenetrable ideological “Bubble” have become the stuff of legend. It’s always amazed me the extent to which the Bush gang will shield itself from anyone, or anything, that even resembles dissent. We’re dealing with a group that believes it has a monopoly on truth, so it will frequently go to extraordinary lengths to obstruct those who disagree.
In the case of Steven Howards, the story is not just absurd, it’s possibly illegal.
The incident sounds pretty harmless. In June 2006, Howards, a 55-year-old environmental consultant, was taking his 8-year-old son to a piano lesson last June when he saw Dick Cheney. Howards approached the Vice President, got within two feet of him and calmly said, “I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible.” Howards then reportedly patted Cheney on the shoulder as he walked away.
Howards walked back through the area 10 minutes later when a Secret Service agent handcuffed him and said he would be charged with “assaulting” the VP. Howards eventually faced misdemeanor harassment charges that could have resulted in up to a year in jail, though the charges were later dismissed at the request of the local district attorney.
At this point, it sounds like just another ridiculous incident involving a heavy-handed White House. But Howards wasn’t about to let this go — he filed a lawsuit against the Secret Service, alleging civil rights and free-speech violations. That’s where the story gets interesting.
[T]he blip has become a blowup, with Secret Service agents — under oath in court depositions — accusing one another of unethical and perhaps even illegal conduct in the handling of Mr. Howards’s arrest and the official accounting of it. […]
The agent who made the arrest, Virgil D. Reichle Jr., said in a deposition that he was left hanging with an untenable arrest because two agents assigned to the vice president had at first agreed with a Denver agent that there had been assault on Mr. Cheney by Mr. Howards, then changed their stories to say that no assault had occurred.
We very rarely get a glimpse at how the Secret Service operates. The word “secret” in the name means something. But in this case, we’re getting a peek behind the curtain, and it isn’t pretty.
Mr. Reichle, who did not witness the encounter, said in his deposition that he believed the vice president’s security detail had wanted the Howards arrest to go away so that Mr. Cheney would not be inconvenienced by a court case.
Mr. Cheney has not been deposed, and his involvement in the arrest remains uncertain. But one of the three agents assigned to him, Daniel McLaughlin, said in his deposition that Mr. Reichle’s description was backward.
Mr. McLaughlin said Mr. Reichle, who has since been transferred to Guam, asked him in a call several hours after the encounter to say that there had been an assault to bolster justification for the arrest.
By then, Mr. McLaughlin and another agent assigned to Mr. Cheney who is also a defendant in the lawsuit, Adam Daniels, had already filed statements that said there had been contact, but no assault. Another agent and co-defendant, Dan Doyle, who was based in the Denver office, sided with his officemate, Mr. Reichle, and said there had been. The fifth defendant, Kristopher Mischloney, an agent on Mr. Cheney’s security team, said he was not close enough to see, but was named in the suit because he had assisted in the arrest.
Changing an agent’s report would have been a federal crime.
“Did you believe that Agent Reichle was telling you in essence, ‘I want you to commit the crime of making false statements in an officially filed Secret Service document?’ ” asked a lawyer for Mr. Howards, David A. Lane.
“When he made the phone call, that’s what I — I interpreted it as, that was unethical,” Mr. McLaughlin responded, according to a transcript of his deposition.
“Not just unethical but illegal?” Mr. Lane pressed.
“Yes, sir.”
What a tangled web they wove. They made an unnecessary arrest, fabricated a criminal charge, and then orchestrated what one official described as a “cover-up,” including some agents pressuring their colleagues to lie.
By all appearances, it looks as if a man was arrested for criticizing Cheney, and Secret Service agents had to scramble to figure out what to do about it.
In his deposition, Mr. McLaughlin said that Mr. Reichle had used the word “cover-up” as early as the morning after the encounter.
Mr. McLaughlin said in his deposition that Mr. Reichle was waiting outside his hotel that morning.
” ‘The vice president’s detail is involved in a cover-up,’ ” Mr. McLaughlin quoted Mr. Reichle as saying. “I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And he said, ‘You guys are involved in a cover-up.’ ”
Asked in the deposition what he made of that, Mr. McLaughlin said, “I thought that he had taken a giant leap away from his good senses.”
Read the whole thing. It’s quite a story.