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?’”
• • •
One 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.”)
• • •
It’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.
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.”
• • •
Issa 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 Capit
ol 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.”
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