As far as the Justice Department could tell, Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church were a bunch of certified crazies. The crazies liked the publicity they were getting. These guys ran on a shoestring budget, and anything that got them in the news was a way for them to get their message out to the masses. As soon as they were cut loose, they went back to the hospital and began protesting again. That earned them a second trip to a federal lockup, until a lawyer got them cut loose. Their regular lawyer, Shirley Phelps-Roper, was Fred Phelps’ daughter, and had been arrested as the person who had given Marilyn the black eye.
When they got out the second time, they really went too far. They decided to go after the hospital, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. They put up on their website, www.godhatesfags. com, the names of some of the doctors and nurses working on Charlie, with their home addresses, and pictures with bulls-eyes superimposed on them. Justice immediately assigned U.S. Marshals to protect all the doctors and nurses, and yanked the kooks all back into jail a third time, and then got a court order to shut down the website.
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.