The Bush administration will leave the annals of presidential disrepute several times thicker than it found them. There’s Iraq, the hospital visit to John Ashcroft, the US attorney firings. But historians will note that those are only the beginning of the Bush administration scandals. Does the name Jeff Gannon ring a bell? Boxgate? What about the anti-prostitution AIDS tsar who purchased the services of—wait for it—the D.C. Madam? The Daily Beast has put together 20 of Bush’s greatest forgotten scandals.
Interior Department officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives."
Sex and Shoplifting
1) In March 2006, Claude Allen, Bush's top domestic policy aide, was arrested when he tried to return items he had
shoplifted from Target for cash refunds. Allen, who made $161,000 a year, blamed stress from Hurricane Katrina.
2) In 2005, bloggers pricked up their ears when a reporter named Jeff Gannon asked a softball question at a Bush press conference. Some sleuthing turned up
nude photos of Gannon—real name: James Guckert—on
male escort websites.
3) Randall Tobias, Bush’s AIDS tsar, mandated that organizations must oppose prostitution in order to receive American aid. It later emerged that Tobias
purchased services through the notorious D.C. Madam, though Tobias maintained he only bought
“massages.”
4) The Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service would not seem to be the sexiest government agency. But a
departmental investigation last year found that officials had “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had
used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”
Where’d the Money Go?
5) When testifying before Congress in 2007, L. Paul Bremer, the former head of reconstruction in Iraq, was
unable to account for as much as $12 billion—about half of his budget—as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority between May 2003 and June 2004. According to a report by Rep. Henry Waxman, contractors brought bags to meetings in order to collect
shrink-wrapped bundles of money.
6) In 2004, Pentagon auditors found that Halliburton had
not adequately accounted for $1.8 billion of the bill it sent to the United States government for its work in Iraq and Kuwait.
7) Also that year, Bunnatine Greenhouse, the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting officer, charged that KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary, unfairly received
billions of dollars worth of no-bid contracts in Iraq. Greenhouse was
demoted in 2005.
Disappearances
8) In 2002, Canadian citizen Maher Arar was
detained at an airport in New York and spirited away to Syria, where he was
tortured and held for 10 months by his captors before being returned home. Canadian officials investigated Arar's case, declared he was innocent, and paid him $9 million in compensation. American officials refused to admit the mistake and instead kept Arar on a terrorist watch list.
9) Army Captain James Yee, a Muslim chaplain in Guantanamo Bay, was
hooded, shackled, and detained in solitary confinement for 76 days on charges of espionage. Within a year the case against Yee had collapsed and the Army tried to save face by charging him with hoarding pornography.
All the President’s Wordsmiths
10) In an
email to friends, Danielle Crittenden, the wife of White House speechwriter David Frum, bragged that her husband had written Bush’s famous “Axis of Evil” line. The e-mail
leaked to Slate, causing a minor scandal.
11) Part of the self-created mythology of White House speechwriter Michael Gerson was that he
composed his speeches in longhand. But as fellow scribe Matthew Scully later noted: “At the precise moment when the State of the Union address was being drafted at the White House by John [McConnell] and me, Mike was off
pretending to craft the State of the Union in longhand for the benefit of a reporter.”
No Administration Friend Left Behind
12) First there was Columnist Gate: In 2005, USA Today
reported that conservative commentator Armstrong Williams received a
$240,000 contract from the Department of Education to promote No Child Left Behind on his television show and to sell other African-American journalists on the legislation. Later, The Washington Post uncovered a similar deal with columnist Maggie Gallagher to promote a marriage initiative for the Department of Health.
13) A Defense Department
report in 2006 urged the military to end its practice of paying Iraqi journalists to publish
pro-American stories in their newspapers, arguing the tactic would "undermine the concept of a free press."
14) According to The New York Times, Karl Rove scored lobbyist Ralph Reed a
lucrative contract with Enron in 1997 to gain his support in the 2000 presidential race.
15) David Safavian, the former chief of staff of the General Services Administration, was convicted of helping Jack Abramoff on a shady land deal as well as concealing a
" lavish weeklong golf trip" paid for by Abramoff.
16) As head of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz was forced to
resign in disgrace after he helped his
"female companion,
" Shaha Riza, score a $60,000 pay raise and promotion—and then tried to cover it up.
Down the Memory Hole
17) Bush fundraiser Lurita Doan's gig as chair of the General Services Administration
went down in flames when she was accused of asking agency staff to help
Republican candidates win elections. Doan denied any wrongdoing. When witnesses said she asked her staff at a meeting, "How can we use GSA to help our candidates in the next election?" Doan claimed she had no memory of the presentation.
18) Though Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, was suspected of being the anthrax mailer, that didn't keep Bush and Cheney from
openly speculating that
Al Qaeda was behind the attacks and even going so far as to pressure FBI officials to come up with a bin Laden connection, according to the New York Daily News.
Mission Accomplished
19) In 2003, Bush went to a warehouse in St. Louis to give a speech titled “Strengthening America’s Economy.” But the boxes laid out before the presidential podium bore the label
"Made in China." The labels were then obscured with white paper. The White House blamed an "
overzealous advance volunteer.”
The Last Word
20) The administration ethos was nicely summarized during the investigation in the firing of US attorneys, in a
testy exchange between former White House Political Director Sara Taylor and Sen. Patrick Leahy. Taylor: "I took an
oath to the president…And I believe that taking that oath means that I need to respect, and do respect, my service to the president." Leahy: "No, the oath says that you take an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States. That is your paramount duty. I know that the president refers to the government being his government—it's not."
