At first blush, it would appear that the arrest of Claude Allen, a top domestic policy advisor to the president, wouldn’t necessarily reflect poorly on the White House. If the allegations are accurate, we’re looking at a troubled individual who felt compelled to shoplift from Target. It’s hard to blame that on the Bush gang.
Well, for the most part. It’s certainly not the president’s fault Allen got involved in some bizarre shoplifting scheme, but at the same time, they bear some responsibility for the political mess. The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, a conservative ally of the Bush White House, wrote today:
White House Chief of Staff Andy Card and Counsel Harriett Miers knew Mr. Allen had a problem when he told them about the incident in early January. They chose to accept his side of the story, and put him in the audience seated near the First Lady at the State of the Union address.
By not adequately protecting the president from embarrassment in the Allen matter, the White House staff has once again put team loyalty over common sense. Given the string of recent disasters the White House has presided over — from Katrina and Ms. Miers’ Supreme Court appointment to the Dubai debacle — there is growing evidence that the Bush White House is exhibiting signs of a dysfunctional management culture that desperately needs new people.
I disagree with the conclusion — Bush sets the dysfunctional management culture; new people wouldn’t matter — but Fund’s broader observation seems accurate. Top White House officials knew about Allen’s “problem” when he was initially arrested in January, but they decided not to do anything.
What’s more, they were neither honest nor diligent about it.
As Mark Kleiman noted, when Allen eventually resigned, the White House played along with Allen’s story about wanting to spend more time with his family, even though they knew it wasn’t true.
But it seems overwhelmingly likely that senior people there, and presumably Bush himself, knew it was false: knew, in fact, that Allen was about to be indicted and (probably) that the evidentiary base under that indictment was solid.
Allen’s access to the White House depended on his having passed a background check. A habit of shoplifting, if known, would certainly have been a disqualification. (This may seem silly, but it’s actually not unreasonable to worry about having someone with chronic light fingers and/or severe money problems walking around amid all that burn-before-reading material.)
So unless Miers and Card were completely asleep at the switch, someone from the Secret Service should have been on the Allen case the day after he told them about his arrest. Knowing from Allen himself where the arrest took place, it wouldn’t have been hard to get to the store security officer who busted him, who would have provided plenty of detail to put a hole in Allen’s “misunderstanding” story.
Quite right. The White House didn’t do any of these things. Indeed, they rewarded Allen with a prestigious seat at the State of the Union, and played along when he wrote a bogus resignation letter. A “dysfunctional management culture,” indeed.
Post Script: On a historical note, I thought I’d add, for those keeping score at home, the number of top administration officials who are currently facing felony criminal charges is now up to three: Claude Allen, Scooter Libby, and David Safavian (the administration’s former top procurement officer who stands accused of obstructing a criminal investigation into Jack Abramoff’s dealings with the federal government). That’s three more than from the Clinton White House, but still trailing Reagan’s.