This Town (22 page)

He had conversations with David Marin, a former staffer on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform who had gone to work at the Podesta Group, one of the top lobbying shops in town. After the
New Yorker
story, Marin called Larry Brady, the majority staff director on the committee—one of Kurt’s bosses—to put in a good word.

“Thank you for your gracious and insightful comments to Larry,” Kurt wrote Marin in an e-mail message. Marin assured him that it was “all true, man,” and urged Kurt to keep his chin up. “Will do man,” Kurt said. “I do want to get together to kind of talk about the future—1 yr, 2 yrs from now.” They would keep in touch. Kurt also wrote a letter to the head of Creative Artists Agency, the Hollywood talent agency, about setting up a business to help movie stars deal with the media on their visits to Washington. He vowed to lie low and stay out of the press—even Playbook—for a while. Mike Allen took him to lunch, asked him how he was doing. He showed concern for Kurt “as a person, as a friend,” which Kurt very much appreciated.

Kurt also received a reassuring e-mail from Juleanna Glover, a longtime Republican flack, lobbyist, and hostess best known for the People Worth Knowing parties she throws at her large Kalorama home.

In her note to Kurt, Juleanna assured Kurt that Lizza’s full airing of Issa’s past in the disastrous
New Yorker
profile would inoculate the congressman from future examinations of his sordid history—“especially,” Glover wrote, “since Issa did such a sublime job in answering all of the questions.” (Indeed, Issa was just
sublime
in explaining away the auto-theft raps.) “The piece turned out to be a real credit to your boss’s intellect, insights and humanity,” Glover wrote.

“Thanks for that Juleanna,” Kurt replied. “Appreciate your insight.”

Bardella said he was not angry at Ryan Lizza. It was Bardella himself who was stupid. He should have known much better. He even made a point of reaching out to Lizza and setting a lunch date, just to debrief. Everything was cool with Ryan.

But he was happy to bitch about Lizza when it was convenient. In many cases, fellow Republicans would approach him knowingly, assuming that the reporter was a biased liberal who had been out to get him. Matt Mackowiak, a GOP flack, sent a buck-up note to Kurt, with whom he often played basketball. “Yo dude . . . you ok?” Mackowiak wrote. “Thought Lizza excerpt might be problematic. . . . Did he screw you?”

Kurt replied, “Brother—talk about taken out of friggin context. I’ll survive. More worried about Darrell than myself right now but thanks for checking on me.”

For about a three-month period between December 2010 and February 2011, Kurt would forward me seven or eight e-mails a day, on average. Most of them were from reporters or television producer/booker types. They would ebb and flow, sometimes stopping for a few days and then picking up again. It was, sure enough, a window into how Kurt spent his days and a peek into how business is done on Capitol Hill. The vast majority of the e-mails were uninteresting and pro forma—requests to have Congressman Issa come on such-and-such a show, or Kurt reaching out to such-and-such a name brand to offer “guidance.” Howie Kurtz sent Kurt a conciliatory note, saying that he regretted the episode in which he quoted “Issa” (after speaking to Kurt). He hoped they could move forward, and Bardella agreed.

I sensed that Kurt was sending me a lot of what he believed was his best work. These were the missives he felt most enamored of and that best projected himself as a real PR operator, not to be messed with.

For example, after receiving a request for Issa to appear on liberal commentator Ed Schultz’s MSNBC show (“All best to you in the new congress,” the booker signed off), Kurt was happy to bcc me in his reply: “Given that Ed has been lambasting Darrell for months every day, he has no interest in going on a show with a host who already has his mind made up.”

In the vein of “This is how Congress really works,” Kurt would forward me e-mails from counterparts in other Republican press shops. They would ask him to concoct quotes from Issa about their bosses that they could use in their own press releases. The press secretary for Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, for instance, asked Kurt to contribute something (from Issa) for an announcement they were making about McHenry being named the chairman of an Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee. “Patrick will be at the heart of our Committee’s effort to make the federal bureaucracy more accountable for how it spends the American people’s money,” Issa said/Kurt obliged, and the boilerplate went on for several more sentences.

Kurt also delighted in sending me an annoyed e-mail from the office of Maine senator Susan Collins, the ranking Republican on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Collins was upset because Issa’s office leaked out news that FEMA had improperly awarded a $450,000 grant to an affiliate of ACORN—the product of an investigation that Issa and Collins had worked on together. But only Issa was quoted in the story, which appeared in the
New York Times
.

“Hey Kurt,” wrote Collins’s spokesman Kevin Kelley, “needless to say, my boss really wishes she had a shot at including a quote, along with your boss, in the stories that have come out since your office decided to leak a report that was jointly requested.”

Later that day, Kurt sent me a postscript to the exchange under the heading “You’ll love this.”

“Jen Burita, Sen. Collins’ Deputy COS who was the Comm Dir when I worked for Olympia, just called my Chief of Staff to complain that I had not apologized for scooping them.” What did the chief of staff say in response? “He hung up the phone and said, ‘Did I sound indifferent enough?’”

•   •   •

O
ne Friday night in late February 2011, I was at my office and my cell phone rang. It was Kurt, sounding shaky. “Jake Sherman at Politico
is working on a story about me,” he said. He explained that Sherman and his colleague Marin Cogan had heard Kurt had been copying me on e-mails. I had wondered when this would become an issue.

Kurt had been telling quite a few people of the e-mail forwarding. Boasting, it seemed. A few people had asked me about it in amused disbelief (never anger). It was only a matter of time before it got into the bloodstream. Bardella had told Ryan Lizza about it. Lizza asked me about it at one point when he was working on his twin killing of Issa–Bardella in the
New Yorker
. We joked—in the vein of me saying, “So, I guess you’re having lunch with Bardella tomorrow at Bistro Bis, huh?” At one point I might have mentioned to Kurt that he should perhaps be a little less vocal about this. He claimed he had not told a soul about the e-mail forwarding. That was a lie but I didn’t press it. The truth of it was I didn’t think most of the e-mails were that interesting. The fact that he was forwarding the e-mails was more interesting—and apparently newsworthy. A random sampling:

• A producer at Fox Business wanted to know if Issa could go on David Asman’s show, whoever David Asman was (apparently Issa used to go on but then stopped). “We felt spurned lately,” the producer wrote.
  
• Newt Gingrich himself wrote, thanking Kurt for sending him unsolicited talking points before the former House speaker went on
  Meet the Press
  (“Very helpful thanks Newt”).
  
• The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein was pissed that Kurt would go to Politico with an exclusive about Issa attacking a mortgage program of some kind. “Brutal,” Stein wrote. “This is huff posts wheelhouse. You should have come to us with this exclusive!”
  

On the phone, Kurt kept asking me what he should do. He was speaking hushed and out of breath, as if he were hiding under a stairwell. I told him he could always just say he was not at liberty to discuss his participation in my book—or some righteous stonewall like that. He told me that that’s what he did. Except what he actually told Sherman was: “Am I bcc’ing him [me] on every e-mail I send out? Of course not.” At which point it was clear Kurt was nailed. Any idiot knew what that meant: that he was bcc’ing me on some e-mails.

Jake Sherman called me a few minutes later. We had never met but I knew who he was: a good young reporter who had been covering the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for about a year. I had been reading his stories (and, yes, a few of his e-mails) because of my interest in Kurt. We spoke mostly off the record. I confirmed nothing for him, which made me feel like an idiot, because he clearly had picked up the true rumor and my first instinct was just to tell him what was going on. But it was unclear if he had publishable goods and I was not going to be his confirming source on the e-mails. I was in no position to unless Kurt released me from our ground rules—that I would not reveal any details of our arrangement until after this book was published.

We went back and forth, Sherman and I. I reminded him that someone’s career and reputation hung in the balance—which, in retrospect, must have sounded patronizing and manipulative.

To any normal population of news consumers, a Hill flack forwarding e-mails to a newspaper reporter writing a book would not be a “story” that anyone would care about. Few people—in places like Amarillo or Fort Collins or Macon—even know what flacks are or why they exist (much less that they account for billions of dollars in the economy of the nation’s capital). But it—The Club—is no normal population. It is an exceptional population: Washington reporters and operatives and bystanders and time servers and coat holders. The people Politico
writes for and about. What could be more interesting? Washington puts the “me” in “media.”

At this point, my uh-oh bone was vibrating. This little Beltway amusement seemed primed for takeoff, with me in the middle of the story, not where a reporter wants to be.

The next day, Saturday, I received a call from John Harris, the founding editor of Politico and my former colleague at the
Washington Post
. He said he was particularly interested in this Bardella story and was trying to get to the bottom of it. Our conversation mimicked the one I had had the day before with Sherman: John wanted to know what was going on, and I told him nothing while trying to appear helpful.

The one difference in my conversation with Harris is that I had known and worked with him for years. Now we were on different sides of the field, theoretically, though united by our shared participation in the esoteric game: two socks tumbling in the same dryer, fellow patrons of the laundromat about to be staring at us.

The absurdity of it was magnified further by the fact that John and I would be together a few hours later at a fortieth-birthday party for Jim VandeHei, his fellow founding editor at Politico
and our former colleague at the
Post
. “Couldn’t this wait until VandeHei’s party?” I joked to Harris at the beginning of our conversation, before we assumed our roles.

VandeHei’s fortieth was held at the American Legion Hall on Capitol Hill and was its own festival of the D.C. prominent. There was a video tribute to Jim from rising-star Republican Paul Ryan and Obama economic guru Austan Goolsbee and Club royalty like Bob Woodward and Tom Brokaw. There was a classic garage rock band and a lot of Wisconsin things—Old Milwaukee beer, Green Bay Packers paraphernalia—in testament to Jim’s home state. About 150 people showed up, including some of the Politico
reporters and editors who were involved in this still-unpublished Bardella story. None of us discussed the in-the-works piece. I spent a portion of the evening wearing a cheesehead.

The next day, Harris wrote to Issa demanding that the congressman, the top investigator in the United States House of Representatives, look into the matter of whether his flack was forwarding e-mails from reporters to another reporter who was working on a book about people who found this kind of thing interesting.

If in fact this activity went on, Harris wrote, it would be “egregiously unprofessional” conduct. Harris was operating under the guise of an editor who was “raising concerns.” It was also a smart reportorial gambit: an official complaint that would elicit some action from Issa that would propel a Politico-perfect story. Issa agreed that forwarding internal e-mails would be “improper.”

(My personal view is that e-mails to public officials in a government office are a matter of legitimate public record. As Jack Shafer, the media writer at Slate, pointed out, “I don’t see why a government official leaking to a reporter about a national security matter is kosher, but a government official leaking about what reporters are asking him about is ‘egregiously unprofessional,’ ‘compromising,’ or ‘intolerable,’ as Harris puts it.”)

•   •   •

I
t’s the start of what I’m sure will be a memorable week,” Bardella posted cryptically on his Facebook page on Monday, February 28.

Politico’s Sherman and Cogan wrote their first story on the subject that evening. It began: “Rep. Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the powerful Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has launched an inquiry into whether spokesman Kurt Bardella improperly shared e-mails from other reporters with a New York Times reporter writing a book on Washington’s political culture, Politico
has learned.” Politico is constantly telling its readers what Politico has learned. It continued: “Issa, Bardella and Leibovich were all given several opportunities by Politico
to deny that the e-mails were improperly shared. Bardella and Leibovich declined comment. Issa says he simply does not know.”

I particularly loved the sinister tone of that, as if all of us were caught together in an airport restroom or something.

Washington convention dictated that Issa must go through the all-important
Process
of
Investigating
this matter and then issue his
Findings
. Part of this would include him seeking me out for questioning. I would not cooperate in Issa’s “investigation” because (1) that would violate my ground rules with Bardella, (2) it would be partaking of a political exercise (which Issa’s “investigation” clearly was), and (3) “refusing to cooperate” with the authority is the badass thing for a reporter do.