I told Frank Keating to use any trick in the books to put a crimp in these assholes' nuttiness. Anything was fair game, and if he wanted my lawyers to chase them down as well, to simply let me know. They had declared war on the wrong guy! My biggest problem was that almost everything they did was covered with the twin mantles of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Sooner or later they would win on this, guaranteed. They would probably even beat the 'threats against federally protected individuals' laws. In the meantime, however, we could tie them up. For instance, the Justice Department managed to freeze the church's funds, and the IRS revoked their tax exempt status by declaring they weren't a church, but a political organization. This wasn't a bad approach; the Klan had been broken by lawsuits that made them pay damages. The individuals in the church were also targeted, and even the bus they had driven in on was impounded. As for the personal lawsuits against Marilyn, we countersued.
Was this an abuse of power? Illegal seizure? Malicious prosecution? You're damn right it was! On the other hand, there are some cases you just can't lose. The only group in America who actually liked these guys was the American Civil Liberties Union. Everybody else was uniformly disgusted by them. This did not play badly for me in the court of public opinion. I simply needed them muzzled until I was out of office. After that I could go after them with both barrels!
Chapter 171: Family Matters
Marilyn's blitz of the talk shows did what we intended it to do. It put a human face, a very likeable human face, on the clusterfuck in Pittsburgh. Marilyn was polling in the low 90s, and all across the country people were rallying to her side on this. Only the ACLU was defending them, and they had offered their services. (Westboro Baptist promptly condemned them as being part of the 'Jewish power elite', but with their assets frozen, it wasn't like they could actually pay for lawyers; they couldn't afford to be picky.) Harry Reid and Congress were not going to be able to come after me by chewing on Marilyn.
Likewise, Elizabeth Warren was out of the line of fire at Treasury. The Dems who wanted to fry me were simply consternated by the fact that the Secretary of the Treasury was also a Democrat. That took care of another concern.
On the other hand, the Secret Service was about to get a reaming the likes of which they hadn't seen since the Kennedy assassination. Politically, attacking me through the Secret Service was cheap and easy. I wasn't all that interested in helping to fend off the attacks, either. Her detail had screwed up across the board, and if anything had happened to her I would have never forgiven them. The Senate Finance Committee assigned a Special Investigator to the case, and turned him loose with a budget that would have made Ken Starr drool.
Well, if you look hard enough, you can always find something. A Special Investigator isn't simply a single person, but is everybody who he hires to look into things. A lot of it is just incredibly boring! Follow the money – hire a bunch of accountants to go over every file related to money. Follow the emails – hire a bunch of computer guys and print out libraries full of emails. Follow the testimony – hire a bunch of lawyers to take depositions from anybody and everybody.
Follow the money, and that's what they did. There is no bill too small to notice, and that is what killed the Secret Service. By the end of October an accountant with nothing better to do was going over the expense reports of everybody assigned to anybody on the Presidential Protective Detail. This wasn't just the people assigned to me, but also the agents assigned to Marilyn and the kids, as well as anybody else around, such as the advance parties that go to various places to prep for a Presidential visit.
One such preparation trip came in advance of my speech at the Organization of American States in Brasilia, Brazil, in March, 2006. I flew in, made a speech notable for its lack of notability, enjoyed a state dinner, and then flew home. I didn't even stay the night. Regardless, several dozen Secret Service agents flew down ahead of time to go over motorcade routes, speaking locations, itineraries, and the like. They then went home with their report. It took them several days. When they are in a country, they generally use cars assigned to the embassy, although sometimes they use rental cars.
Why then was there an expense account charge for $20 for a cab ride for someone with the initials VF? Who was VF? Nobody at the embassy had those initials, and neither did anybody on the prep team? Why did the agent who put in the expense report suddenly clam up and refuse to answer? Why don't we just send somebody from the Special Investigator's office to Brazil on the taxpayer's dime and ask the cab company about this VF?
It was like watching a sweater unravel when somebody pulled a loose bit of yarn. Within a matter of days, and with the entire disaster being leaked to the press via speed dial, the Secret Service was gutted like a fish! VF turned out to be Victoria Federica, a 'model' and part-time prostitute hired by some of the team as entertainment. They sent her home the next morning, and since nobody wanted to pay the $20 cab fare, they charged it to the U.S. of A. The cheap and stupid bastards managed to sink themselves because nobody wanted to pay a hooker an extra $20 to cover her cab fare.
I learned about this comedy of errors from Frank and Will. The Washington Post had a photo of the young lady in question, and she was quite attractive. I commented to them that I was getting screwed by the young lady and hadn't even managed to get screwed. Will simply promised that if I ever said that in public, he would personally beat me to death with the microphone, and Frank promised to hold me down and help. I nodded in acquiescence.
Harry Reid and Max Baucus managed to get their scandal, big time! This was front page news for two weeks, as the numbers and names of the agents came to light, and the phrase 'Wheels up, rings off!' came into the American lexicon. It seemed that this was an accepted practice amongst the prep teams. I called in Acting Director Nagel and read him the riot act, and ordered him to clean this mess up immediately. I was both unable and unwilling to deflect any blame that might be forthcoming. The Secret Service was going to get slammed on this, and they had nobody to blame but themselves.
John McCain was furious about all of this. Mud splashed on the President was the same as mud splashed on the Vice President. The primaries would begin in January, and the Senate Finance Committee was promising Congressional hearings on the Secret Service beginning after the winter recess. What that would do was to insure that after the holidays, the press had some nice and juicy blood-letting to go along with the primaries. John was my presumptive heir apparent. If I looked bad, he looked bad, and Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee were loudly demanding an even larger investigation, including sworn testimony from Marilyn and my family. (I called Brewster McRiley and Mike Duncan of the RNC and told them to explain how that was never going to happen.) Their theory was that if I looked bad, John looked bad, and if John looked bad, they would look good.
We did what we could do to mitigate the problem. Nagel cleaned house in the prep teams, and a dozen agents resigned or were fired by mid-November. It wasn't enough, and I let Nagel go as well, replacing him with an Assistant Director from the finance side of the Secret Service. That was the investigatory unit responsible for counterfeiting and other securities related crimes. The only ones lower in the hierarchy than them were the uniformed guys, and I promised that if it became necessary, they would be the only ones left. I didn't care how much blood had to be shed, but I wanted the Secret Service cleaned up!
It wasn't entirely the winter of my discontent. By the end of October Charlie had recovered enough to get booted out of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. I had been going up most weekends to visit, and Marilyn and Megan had worked out a schedule where one of them was always around for him. Megan had flown to Los Angeles in September for a small part, but had been unhappy about it and declined the role. It was obvious that she had been chosen because of her relationship to Charlie, and her outfit was on the skimpy side of skimpy. She had a long talk with her agent and then flew home to Omaha for a few days before coming back to Pittsburgh. Marilyn wasn't completely sure, but she told me that she thought Megan's acting career was over.