This Town (23 page)

The next few days swirled. At least 150 stories were written about
l’affaire Bardella
in the seventy-two hours after the original “bombshell” was posted on Politico
.
(Politico
would run seven stories on the subject in the first forty-eight hours.) VandeHei did a video clip on Politico.com declaring that this story would be “driving the day.” Mike Allen devoted exactly half of Playbook to it on the Tuesday morning that it “drove the day.” He and others sometimes referred to me in print as “Leibo,” a nickname I acquired in about first grade that has persisted through every station of my life. As a general rule, I don’t mind the nickname. It was always a good early-warning system in college of which women would never consider going out with me (if they called me by the infantalizing “Leibo,” I had no chance). But I disliked being called “Leibo” in print because it suggested a level of coziness and clubbiness that, while pervasive, I’d rather not be so easily pegged with—especially since I’m writing a book on just that.

My employer, the
New York Times
, published a story on the Bardella matter, as did my last employer, the
Washington Post
. Many people I have known and worked and socialized with for years wrote essays and blog posts and columns about the saga. The stories were all comically larded with “full disclosures” about how the people writing them were friends with this person or that person or, in many cases, me.

I was in the middle of the mess yet feeling very popular. Shafer, the press critic at Slate, called out the grandstanding and overreaction of John Harris while adding: “FYI: Mark Leibovich is a friend of mine.” (For good measure, he sent me an encouraging e-mail that day saying, “I worship your bald head.”) Ryan Lizza wrote a long blog post for the
New Yorker
(“Full disclosure: both Cogan and Leibovich are friends of mine”). Jeffrey Goldberg, author of
Goldblog
in the
Atlantic
, weighed in with a short post in which he said I was a “friend of Goldblog,” and so was Shafer (“except when he’s yelling at me for something”), and that Lizza was his replacement when he worked at the
New Yorker
(“and also a friend—yes, it amazes me too, that I have friends, though mainly I have shifting alliances”).

In his
Washington Post
column, Dana Milbank (a friend!) wrote that “if Washington’s political culture gets any more incestuous, our children are going to be born with extra fingers.”

The best thing written about the whole episode was on Twitter by John Dickerson, a political writer for Slate, talking head for CBS News, and you-know-what of mine: “Instead of writing a book about how self-involved Washington is,” Dickerson wrote, “Mark Leibovich has gotten people to act it out in real time.”

•   •   •

I
ssa called me on my cell phone Tuesday morning. “Hey, we’re in the news,” I said to him, maybe too glibly. “I’ve had better weeks,” he said. And then, in boilerplate voice, I told him I would not help him in his investigation. My Tiananmen Square! Issa seemed to expect this and appeared to be just checking a box with his call anyway, buying the right to publicly say he had “talked to Leibovich” in his subsequent description of his inquiry. Our conversation lasted about two or three minutes. I told him that I did not think Kurt was a bad guy or that his intentions were malicious.

Later that day, Issa called Kurt into his office and fired him.

His actions reflected badly on Issa and the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Issa told Mini-Me. “The committee’s deputy communications director, Kurt Bardella, did share reporter e-mail correspondence with New York Times journalist Mark Leibovich for a book project,” Issa said in a statement. “Though limited, these actions were highly inappropriate, a basic breach of trust with the reporters it was his job to assist, and inconsistent with established communications office policies. As a consequence, his employment has been terminated.”

New stories popped online about Bardella’s firing. A headline in the Huffington Post political tip sheet “HuffPost Hill” said the following: “A book about the incestuousness of Washington—written by a man everyone incestuously calls ‘Leibo’—incestuously got someone fired.”

It’s not fun to be involved in something that gets someone fired. Plus, people were talking to/about me like I’d uncovered some amazing journalistic trove—as if getting a bunch of suck-uppy e-mails that reporters had sent to a Hill flack was like getting slipped the Pentagon Papers. Yes, reporters suck up, especially here, as Shafer pointed out in one of the endless analyses of this thing: “If sucking up to important sources were a crime, 95 percent of all Washington journalists would be doing time right now.” Colleagues kept egging me on to publish as many of their peers’ e-mails as I could possibly fit into this book. “A book that looks at the D.C. media nexus and doesn’t offer someone a measure of embarrassment would be like a film on the desert showing no sand,” wrote Clint Hendler in the
Columbia Journalism Review
. So here I was in the middle of the “Bardella incident” that FoxNews.com’s Chad Pergram said “will reverberate for a while in the halls of Congress” and would “stand as an iconic tale of someone who rose and fell in one of the most unforgiving arenas on the planet.”

If this “iconic tale” had happened a decade ago, maybe it would have merited a mention in Howie Kurtz’s Media Notes column in the Monday
Washington Post
or be the subject of some longer thumb-sucker in the
Columbia Journalism Review
. But because it happened in 2011, with all these new-media outlets and everyone eager to give their “take” on the matter, the story of the rogue flack came to “dominate” the Capitol during a week in which the majority party in Congress was otherwise threatening to shut the government down and a revolution had broken out in Cairo.

Kurtz even devoted part of his CNN show about the media,
Reliable Sources
, to the episode. In an interview with his former
Post
colleague John Harris, Kurtz reminded viewers of his own history with Bardella—the incident in which he quoted Issa in a story when he’d been speaking to Bardella. With Bardella now in full disgrace, Kurtz piled on with a new charge—saying that Bardella had “impersonated” Congressman Issa, which is why he had been confused.

In reality, any “scandal” in Washington that does not include elected officials, money, or nudity is not much of a scandal—except to the media, and only if it’s about the media. “The break-up between Issa and Bardella . . . in Congressional terms is about as seismic as Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston hitting splitsville,” wrote Pergram on FoxNews.com.

Salon’s Alex Pareene produced one of the better “step-back pieces” on the whole affair: “The self-obsessed, navel-gazing Washington press corps is in a tizzy over the dismissal of a congressman’s communications director (the guy whose job it was to befriend and spin and leak to members of the Washington press corps), who was fired for the crime of sharing journalists’ e-mails with another journalist who is working on a book about the self-obsessed, navel-gazing Washington press corps.”

Predictably, the “iconic tale” was a snowflake, dissolving after a few days. People assured me that this controversy had generated a whole bunch of “buzz” for my book, and what could be more important than that? True enough, I suppose, although my selfish writerly concern was that this seemed like a tidy endpoint for the Washington “narrative” of Kurt Bardella.

Kurt was laid low. All the career obituaries—the cautionary tales, the “boy who flew too close to the sun” invocations—catalogued the warning signs and “I told you so’s.”

Politico noted: “‘It was only a matter of time,’ said a reporter for one Capitol Hill publication who had worked with Bardella.”

“Kurt has had danger signs,” said a House Republican aide, granted anonymity by Politico. “If you had said, ‘X press secretary did this,’ Kurt would have been eight out of ten people’s guess.”

Bardella was deep in the barrel, which seemed to me the right place to leave him, story-wise. Silly me. That was premised on Bardella’s being career-dead, never to be heard from again. Which defies the basic laws of nature for the giant Washington amoeba, the one that says you will always have lunch in this town again.

•   •   •

B
ardella disappeared for a few weeks. I did not hear from him. He offered sporadic updates on his Facebook page about playing basketball and being on the Hill. He posted scripture: “‘The LORD is my shepherd; there is nothing I lack.’” He had a bunch of new Facebook friends, which included George Deukmejian, the former Republican governor of California. He talked to friends about how he had lost his way and was returning to God. He was going through a period of self-reflection. I had never heard Kurt talk about religion other than to say he attended Catholic school, but now he was heavy into faith. Not to be cynical, but (oh, what the hell) public faith does tend to be the first step in any Washington rehab.

He e-mailed me at the beginning of April, apologizing for being out of touch. I was slightly surprised, figuring he might want nothing to do with me, the main accomplice in his downfall. I was also relieved that he was okay. No one I had spoken to in the previous weeks knew where Kurt was. A blogger reported that he had decamped to California, but it turned out he never strayed far from his home in Virginia, with occasional forays to Capitol Hill to visit friends. He told me he wanted to get together to fill me in on what he had been thinking and up to.

It was about this time that Bardella began submitting op-ed commentaries to Politico. Yes, Politico—the publication that made Bardella D.C.-famous, that published articles that mentioned his name two dozen times in two years, and that went into saturation mode over the e-mail sharing and covered every angle of his disgrace. Now, after just a few weeks in the barrel, Politico
was serving as an engine of his rehabilitation. Writing as “Kurt Bardella, former congressional aide,” Bardella wrote short essays for the website’s “Arena” section, an open forum for people to “give their take” on some event.

“I needed to keep my name out there and stay sharp,” Kurt would tell me a few weeks later about his Politico
commentaries. He needed the oxygen of his name in print. When I mentioned to Kurt that maybe he had become addicted to the little crack hits of fame that a news-cycle player like himself had become accustomed to, he denied it strenuously. The commentaries, he said, “were just my way of getting a little bit back into the game.”

Kurt asked me to meet him at a Sports Club/LA at the Ritz-Carlton downtown, where he said he had been playing basketball for three hours every day. I suspected he liked the cinematographic view of himself as a gym rat. He wanted me to see it—and ideally reflect it in print—as he had been relegated (for now) to the solitary consolation of his beloved hoops. He spoke to me while heaving up three-pointers and hit eight in a row at one point. Kobe Bryant can play. And the court was a perfect tableau for the sidelined operative—a perfect “visual” in the rehab narrative.

We had lunch at a snack-bar area just off the court. He ate a chicken teriyaki sandwich and spoke of his spirituality. “God has a path for all of us,” he said somberly. He had been praying for patience and grace. He said he had spoken several times to Issa, who never seemed mad at him. “This is someone who would instinctively call me every time he got off an airplane for however many years,” Kurt said. “You don’t just lose that connection.” I asked Kurt if he could see himself returning to Issa’s office. Sure, he said, anything’s possible. But he’s going to wait a while, live on his savings, and see what’s out there.

Bardella said he had lost fake friends in the saga—the anonymous bad-mouthers—which was fine. He had received affirmation too. Bill Burton, the Obama flack who was the first person to suggest that I write about Issa, sent Kurt a “Hang in there” note. Mikey checked in to see how he was holding up. Several reporters who suspected (rightly) that Kurt had shared their e-mails with me wrote to him, saying they were not mad. They offered to get together at his convenience. And if he was inclined to share his story, they would, no doubt, provide him a “fair hearing.”

“I could sense the suck-up brigade coming back,” he told me. Faux empaths make some of the best reporters in town, all promising “fair hearings.” Kurt wound up “giving his story” to a reporter he had known for many years at the now defunct
North County Times
, the paper in his hometown, near San Diego. “
I did lose my way a little bit,” the 2001 graduate of Escondido High School told reporter Mark Walker. Bardella told me he knew that Walker would be friendly and that the story would be told in an unquestioning way, which it was. Kurt would then send the story to Mikey, who would excerpt from the “Bardella speaks” exclusive and his contrition would flow safely into the Playbook community.

A few weeks after Bardella was fired, I would run into people who said they’d been reading about me but did not remember why exactly. Kurt was finding the same thing. The life cycle of public disgrace has been condensed to where the actual offense gets washed away, leaving just a neutral sheen of notoriety.

Kurt received a call one day from a producer for CNN’s Anderson Cooper. They were interested in Bardella’s coming on air to talk as a “Republican strategist,” or something, to discuss how some people were questioning if President Obama was actually born in the United States—the so-called Birthers. Kurt said the producer told him they were looking for “new voices” to put on the air. Kurt—who offered the bonus of being “diverse” (a rare Asian-American talking head)—said he would be interested. They did a pre-interview on the Birther show but the spot fell through. They agreed to keep in touch.

Kurt and I had another get-together at the end of May. He asked me to meet him at a cigar bar downtown called Shelly’s Back Room. He had his own private humidor there. I hate cigar bars.

But I agreed to meet Kurt at Shelly’s in the middle of the day. I was really trying to like him, even now, or at least find him interesting. He told me he had talked to some people about jobs: one with a conservative “super PAC”—an outside group whose primary purpose is to bankroll political advertising—backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, another with some public relations shop in town.