By any reasonable measure, Randall Tobias was never a sound choice to be the administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). About a year ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice merged USAID into the State Department and tapped Tobias, a conservative ideologue, former pharmaceutical executive, and Bush campaign donor, to run the program.
The announcement immediately came under fire. Tobias’ approach to HIV-prevention focused exclusively on “abstinence only,” and he was on record making false public statements about the effectiveness of contraception. In this administration, that doesn’t make you unqualified to direct foreign aid and serve as the president’s “AIDS czar.”
Deputy Secretary of State Randall L. Tobias submitted his resignation Friday, one day after confirming to ABC News that he had been a customer of a Washington, D.C. escort service whose owner has been charged by federal prosecutors with running a prostitution operation.
Tobias, 65, director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), had previously served as the ambassador for the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief.
A State Department press release late Friday afternoon said only he was leaving for “personal reasons.”
At this point, Tobias sounds quite a bit like Ted Haggard — his defense is that he used the escort service “to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage. Tobias, who is married, insisted that he did not have sex with the escorts. For some reason, some people find this hard to believe.
Let’s unpack this story a bit; there are multiple angles to consider.
ABC News reported that Tobias’ use of the service was to supplement a different service he’d been using “with Central Americans” to provide massages.
Josh Marshall noted how offensive this is.
This is the guy in charge of America’s international aid and development assistance to countries around the world. (“I was using one service that sent Thai broads. Now I get ’em to send Central Americans.”) I’m glad this bozo is showing our best face to the world and clearing up any misunderstandings about exploiting people in the Third World.
Two other angles to consider here. First, the controversy surrounding the DC Madam continues to cause heartburn for the Washington establishment.
Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who operated the escort service, was indicted on federal racketeering charges in February and has threatened to expose her high-profile client list.
Palfrey has contended that her escort service provided clients with college-educated women who engaged in legal, sexual game-playing for $275 per 90-minute session in their homes or hotel rooms. Prosecutors allege she ran a prostitution ring.
Palfrey’s attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, said yesterday that he has been contacted in the past few days by five lawyers asking whether their client’s phone numbers are on Palfrey’s list of 10,000 to 15,000 customers from 2002 to 2006. Some have also asked about whether an accommodation can be made to avoid identifying their clients, which Sibley said he is not able to promise. ABC’s “20/20” is mining that database of phone numbers, Sibley said, for a news report on the more notable of Palfrey’s customers.
“I presume ’20/20′ crews running around with cameras has led to this flurry of activity,” Sibley said. “That may cause some people to worry.”
And second, have you noticed how Bush administration employees have decided to engage in a wide variety of alleged criminal activities? We see the more mundane crimes (shoplifting, prostitution), the more serious offenses (lying about Abramoff connections, Hatch Act violations), the much more serious offenses (perjury, obstruction of justice, soliciting sex from a minor, Cunningham-related corruption), to crimes that undermine democracy (lying a country into a war, using the Justice Department as a tool to elect Republicans).
I seem to recall someone promising to return “honor and dignity” to the executive branch. Who was that again?
