I don’t know a lot about Bernard Kerik, Bush’s choice to lead the Department of Homeland Security, but Fred Kaplan laid out a variety of concerns about Kerik’s qualifications that bring his qualifications that raise some serious red flags and should, at an absolute minimum, give the Senate pause during his confirmation hearings.
Less important, but nevertheless interesting, are some of Kerik’s troubling quirks when it comes to personnel, spending, and personality.
Kerik has been known to make up his own rules. While he was police commissioner, the NYPD bought four $50,000 security doors for police headquarters. They turned out to be too heavy for the floor to support. One of them was used by the Department of Corrections, and the other three are in storage. A police department investigation found irregularities in the bidding process. After leaving the NYPD, Kerik became an adviser to a company distributing the doors, though he renounced his deal after the door-maker’s president was indicted for defrauding the city.
OK, that’s pretty bad, but this might be even worse.
Eyes rolled in the NYPD when Kerik reportedly used $3,000 of Police Foundation funds to order up 30 busts of his own likeness, complete with bristling mustache. Possibly because Kerik heard the grumbles, the busts were never handed out.
Then there’s the questionable use of his staff.
In a separate case, Kerik was later reprimanded and required to pay a $2,500 fine for using city cops to help research his memoir.
And his ridiculous partisanship.
After he left as chief of the New York City Department of Corrections in 1999, [Kerik] was named in a civil lawsuit as the architect of a system to force prison guards to work for Republicans in their off-hours. The suit, by a Democratic warden who claimed he was punished for his political views, claimed that Kerik would “hunt down” anyone deemed “disloyal.” The suit was settled; the plaintiff got $300,000 and a promotion. Though a Kerik protégé was later indicted, Kerik himself was never accused of criminal wrongdoing.
Sounds like we’ll be missing Tom Ridge fairly soon.