I liked him instantly.
By that I mean Bardella gave me a headache, but I liked that he flouted the norms of the smooth Washington hustler. In a city where even the most rabid striving must be cloaked in nonchalance, Bardella never pulled this off or even tried. He was not shy about sharing — on his Facebook page — his ultimate ambition: to become the White House press secretary. He was not reticent in acknowledging a danger of his brash style: “I’m never that far away from blowing myself up completely,” he told me once. “It’s all part and parcel of my inferiority complex.” But generally, Bardella added, he was pretty good about channeling his demons in a way that benefited his boss, Representative Darrell Issa, Republican of California.
Bardella evinced a desperation that made him more honest than people in Washington typically are. Or maybe “transparent” is a better word, because he did seem to lie sometimes (or “spin” sometimes), at least to me. Even as he stuck out among earnest Hill deputies, something about Bardella wonderfully embodied the place. It’s not that Washington hasn’t forever been populated by high-reaching fireballs. But an economic and information boom in recent years has transformed the city in ways that go well beyond the standard profile of dysfunction. To say that today’s Washington is too partisan and out of touch is to miss a much more important truth — that rather than being hopelessly divided, it is hopelessly interconnected. It misses the degree to which New Media has both democratized the political conversation and accentuated Washington’s myopic, self-loving tendencies. And it misses, most of all, how an operator like Kurt Bardella can land in a culture of beautifully busy people and, by trading on all the self-interest and egomania that knows no political affiliation, rewrite the story of his own life.
I first met Bardella in May 2010, when he was really starting to make a name for himself. If Republicans won the majority in the House that November, Issa would become chairman of the powerful House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Good for Issa, and by the first law of Washington career gravity, good for Bardella.
The first surprise upon meeting Bardella was his appearance. His Italian name and blustery phone comportment suggested something other than a rail-thin 27-year-old Asian-American in pinstriped suit and tie and matching hanky in the breast pocket. He looked like a teenager playing grown-up.
Something about Bardella cried out for mothering, or fathering, which I suspected might be true even if each of his three fathers (one birth, one adopted, one step-) had not abandoned or alienated him on the way up. He said that the displacement of his youth, his lack of a college degree and his entry into the political work force at a very young age (17) engendered in him a fear that he had no business running with these bulls. So he was a jittery wreck, working long into the night, in the service of pleasing Darrell Issa, or else.
You hear the formulations “He’s like a father to me” and “He’s like a son to me” quite a bit in Washington. Politicians like to self-mythologize through their fathers: John Edwards was “the son of a millworker,” John Boehner “the son of a barkeeper” and so on. “Every man is trying to either live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes,” Barack Obama wrote. The dad thing makes a tidy device for any politician’s story, but the prevailing social dynamic of Washington so often does mimic the quest for paternal love. It is, in many ways, a city of patrons and protégés. “Who do you work for?” is often the first thing people ask here.
But when Bardella said, “Darrell is like a dad to me,” he sounded genuine. “Darrell cares,” he’d say. “He fills a certain void.”
Shortly after he was born, Bardella was abandoned at the door of a church in Seoul, South Korea. He was placed in an orphanage, where he hated to be set down in his crib. At 3 months he was adopted by a childless couple in Rochester. His new mother, Diane Bardella, was pursuing a degree in literature at the University of Rochester, while her husband, Alfred, worked as a security guard. They named the baby Kurt and divorced when he was 3.
Kurt lived with his mother and spent every other weekend with his father. He was enrolled in a Catholic school, where he was bullied and teased because he “looked Chinese.” Diane Bardella remarried when Kurt was 5 and gave birth to two sons. Kurt would taunt his new brothers by telling them, “You were had, I was chosen.” When Kurt was 10, the family moved west, separating him from Alfred. Bardella eventually became estranged from his stepfather after he and Kurt’s mother divorced.
After graduating from high school in 2001, Bardella took a summer internship with a Republican state legislator, who offered him a job. He jumped at the chance, envisioning a political life as presented in the speedy chess game of NBC’s “West Wing,” which fascinated him. The lure was enough for Bardella to blow off college and spend two years doing clerical work in the legislator’s office and attending meetings, dinners and events around town. He eventually took a job as an assignment editor for the local CBS affiliate, but his path to Washington presented itself in 2005, when the San Diego-area congressman Randy (Duke) Cunningham — best known in D.C. for flipping off a constituent, referring to gays as “homos” on the House floor and suggesting the Democratic leadership “be lined up and shot” — got hit with a sack of white-collar-criminal charges (conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud, wire fraud, tax evasion). The Duke headed off to jail, and Bardella headed back into politics, working on the campaign of the Republican Brian Bilbray in the special election to fill Cunningham’s seat. Bilbray won, and in July 2006, Bardella arrived in Washington.
Bardella was never going to be one of those civic-minded idealists who descend on the capital every year to “make a difference.” When I first met him, he admitted that he was not much of a true believer in any political cause. The Republicans simply found him first. He told me that he was not so much an “R” or a “D” as he was an “O” — “an opportunist.” His passions were ignited less by an inspirational candidate or officeholder — there were no posters of Ronald Reagan or J.F.K. — than they were by celebrity operatives on TV, fictional (Josh Lyman) or real (James Carville). They were the players in a thrilling screen game, and Bardella wanted in.
“When I first came here,” he told me, “I was standing on the streetcorner with my suitcase, thinking: There’s no way I belong here. This is crazy. I’m going to get eaten alive.”
As a teenager, Bardella read the memoir of the celebrated Clinton aide turned TV star, George Stephanopoulos, “All Too Human: A Political Education.” What struck Bardella was Stephanopoulos’s description of his years as an altar boy in the Greek Orthodox church he attended in Rye, N.Y. It excited him, Stephanopoulos wrote, to be within the sanctum, an excitement he compared with the thrill he felt later as a political operative who penetrated the privileged circle where decisions are made.
“There is that place to get in Washington that everybody is striving for,” Bardella told me. “Once you get to that place, that inside place, you kind of just know it. It’s exciting,” he said. “But you’re never sure if that feeling is going to last, or if other people are seeing you as someone on the inside. It puts you on edge, constantly.”
As a 22-year-old flack for Bilbray, Bardella sent Stephanopoulos a fan note. He wrote about how much he enjoyed “All Too Human” and how much he admired Stephanopoulos. Stephanopoulos wrote back and invited Bardella to drop by next time he was in the neighborhood of ABC News’s Washington bureau near Dupont Circle. Bardella made a point of being in that neighborhood soon after.
A year later, Bardella was surprised to receive a call from Stephanopoulos, who wanted to know if a certain resolution on immigration was going to pass the House Republican Conference. Bardella told Stephanopoulos that he believed it would pass, which Stephanopoulos said on TV a few hours later, citing “Congressional sources.” Bardella was a “Congressional source”! He described the experience to me as his “first time playing with live ammunition.”
He later called Stephanopoulos, seeking career advice. He was thinking about taking a job in the Senate office of Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, and he asked Stephanopoulos what he thought, a query that also carried the unspoken message that Bardella was being sought after, that he was “in play.”
In December 2007, Bardella did indeed jump to Snowe’s office, but he lasted less than a year. He found the Senate boring, he said — too plodding, too gentlemanly, not his thing — and he returned to Bilbray’s office and identified Darrell Issa as his next big game.
Issa happened to be one of the wealthiest men in Congress, thanks to his magnificently successful car-alarm company. Bardella appreciated that, and he admired — perhaps because he identified with it — Issa’s willingness, even compulsion, to toot his own car horn. While Congress had no shortage of members who thought of themselves as the smartest guy in the room, Issa might have had a legitimate claim. He holds 35 patents, 16 of which hang on his office wall.
Issa’s office was down the hall from Bilbray’s, and Bardella began to camp out there, befriending Issa’s staff and pestering them until they hired him as press secretary.
Issa made clear that he very much wanted to become better known among the political-media cabal, and Bardella took on the obsession as his own. “I am completely focused on making Darrell a household name,” he told me. Before long, Issa was living in greenrooms, a heightened profile he owed largely to Bardella, who was simultaneously at work — a little too intensely — on getting himself noticed. He had what for a staff member was a dangerous knack for getting his name into print, and an even more dangerous craving for more. There’s a fundamental rule on Capitol Hill that aides should stay in the background, but Bardella was too eager to show off how plugged in he was at all times not to violate it.
The emergence of Politico as Washington’s company-town organ — and especially Playbook, its insider’s tip sheet sent out each morning by Mike Allen, D.C.’s electronic town crier — served Bardella’s needs well. Politico wasn’t just a receptive outlet for the pro-Issa stories he was trying to “place”; it was also generous in bestowing a kind of fame on the traditionally innocuous staffer. In an October 2009 Politico story about whether excessive BlackBerry use could be a drag on a staffer’s personal life, Bardella was quoted as saying he always apologizes to dates in advance “because I know I’m going to check my Berry at least eight times in the next 25 minutes.”
Politico was exhaustive in covering the workaholic regimen of the city’s aspiring Josh Lymans, whose stressed TV countenance has been copied and exaggerated as a D.C. pose. They are often crude and fluent in the cutting, sardonic tones characteristic of many of the young operators around town. Politico wrote a trend piece about this (“Washington Soaks Up the Snarkiness”), in which Bardella declared that Washington “is a city that has been built on false premises and false pretenses.”
In 2009 he was named one of the “50 politicos to watch.” “It is only 11:30 a.m., but Kurt Bardella is on his third Red Bull, and he’s got a fourth on deck,” Politico wrote in the profile of Bardella that accompanied his picture. And in another treatment, from January 2010, Bardella was quoted as saying, “I don’t ever stop.” The story was pegged to the sudden death of Boehner’s chief of staff. (Issa later purchased a T-shirt for Bardella that said: “It’s All About Me.”)
Bardella had found love. Issa’s, sure, but also the immediate gratification of the early-21st-century political-media experience. There was none of the slog of policy debates and committee hearings and constituent visits. Public relations is what most politicians care about most, and Bardella was as adept at it as anyone.
With the 2010 midterms approaching and the G.O.P. primed to reclaim the House majority for the first time since 2006, Bardella felt that he, too, was ascendant. He would send talking points over to Newt Gingrich, at his personal e-mail address, to help the former speaker prep for an appearance on “Meet the Press” — and “Newt” wrote back, thanking him. He had a huge whiteboard on which he listed all the media names he was warding off at that particular moment (David at “Meet the Press,” Greta at Fox). They all wanted time with Issa, and Bardella would do his best to make it happen (“Greta has always been fair”), no guarantees, but first he has a call on the other line, and 200 e-mails from bookers to deal with, and the boss calling him on the cell. . . .
I first considered writing about Darrell Issa in the summer of 2010. He was showing up a lot in the press, the articles always saying that he could become a supreme nightmare for the White House if Republicans won the House majority in November. As head of House Oversight, Issa would gain the power to call investigations and issue subpoenas and do pretty much whatever he wanted to distract, embarrass and mess with the Obama mission. He called himself a Reagan Republican, but Issa’s true compass in 2010 seemed to point toward whatever most got under the administration’s skin and himself on television.
Democrats had begun circulating fat opposition files on the prospective chairman. Oppo about Issa always begins with a Los Angeles Times exposé published during his unsuccessful run for the Senate in 1998. The story details what Issa has described as his “colorful youth” — a period that apparently stretched well into his 20s. He pleaded guilty to carrying an unregistered pistol in 1972 and, with his brother William, was indicted on felony charges related to car thefts in 1972 and 1980. (The first case was eventually dismissed; prosecutors dropped the charges on the second.)
I had no idea of Issa’s history until I got a call one summer afternoon from the White House, peddling oppo. Bill Burton, then the deputy press secretary at the White House, urged me (in the most sheepish and above-it-all tones) to spend some time “getting to know Darrell Issa.” As an hors d’oeuvre, Burton mentioned the auto thefts. Interesting, I thought. And kind of funny, since Issa made his fortune selling car alarms.
Not long after, Issa sat for a long interview with me in his office. It was mostly unmemorable, though he twice launched into tangential assaults on Eric Lichtblau, who wrote the L.A. Times story and is now a colleague of mine at The Times. After I made a fact-checking inquiry with Bardella the next day about the old auto-theft charge, a very agitated Issa called minutes later, suggesting that I just have “that hatchet man Lichtblau” write the story for me.
In November, Republicans regained control of the House as expected. As the new chairman of a pivotal committee, Issa was now unquestionably one of the most visible Republicans in Washington. Bardella viewed himself — not just his boss — as a news driver. Reporters were coming to him, not the other way around. If Bardella decided, for instance, to “give” the story of Issa’s first subpoena to Jake Sherman at Politico rather than to Alan Fram at The Associated Press, Sherman could boast of a nice little scoop for himself, while Fram might suffer an unpleasant “Why we no have?” from his editor. The cycle might reverse two hours later when Bardella was ready to award his next nugget.
A few weeks after Election Day, I visited Bardella on Capitol Hill and told him I might be interested in reporting on him for a book I was writing about this supercharged era in the capital. I found him to be an emblematic superstaffer who was making Washington work for him — a kind of will-to-power orphan who was devising his persona on the fly. I loved the sheer unabashedness, even jubilance, of Bardella’s networking and ladder-climbing. Clearly enamored of his own narrative, Bardella was intrigued by my proposition. If I was reading his face right, he had already given some thought as to who would play him in the HBO treatment. He said he believed his was an important story to tell.
I told Bardella that I would visit with him periodically and encouraged him to send along updates and observations by e-mail. Even better, he said, he would copy me on occasional e-mail correspondence that he felt reflected his frenetic days. “My e-mails can basically be read as a diary of how I do my job in this crazy world,” he told me. He didn’t appear to think twice about sharing correspondence from people who did not know their e-mails were being shared — a group that included the occasional member of Congress. Bardella concluded our conversation with a favorite phrase among aggressive D.C. boundary-pushers: “I’ve always thought it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission,” he said.
Bardella would be asking forgiveness soon enough. But the year started well. Issa spent Jan. 2 appearing on three Sunday interview shows, and Republicans formally assumed control of the House on Jan. 5. Bardella spent much of that afternoon moving into his new office, roughly the size of a small hotel room — a major expansion from the crowded cubicle he inhabited in the minority days.
That day, Robert Gibbs announced that he would be leaving as White House press secretary. Though they had never met, Gibbs’s career trajectory was one Bardella dreamed of: he was a journeyman flack who struck gold with the right patron and wound up talking at the lectern at 1600 Pennsylvania. Gibbs’s time at the White House had been a mixed bag, which included internal West Wing clashes, strained relationships with reporters and a few mishaps that resulted from excessive candor. But he was nonetheless set for life as a professional “former.” That is, a former official who can easily score a seven-figure income as an out-of-office wise man, statesman or hired gun. “Formers” stick to Washington like melted cheese on a gold-plated toaster, and Gibbs would be no exception. He could move seamlessly into the news media (MSNBC) at a time when punditry replaced reporting as journalism’s highest pursuit. (Since leaving the White House in 2011, Gibbs has made about $2 million in paid speeches alone.)
Absurdly, I asked Bardella that day what he would say if Obama called asking him to replace Gibbs. He actually seemed to consider the question for a second. “If the president calls, I would have to take it seriously,” he said solemnly before catching himself. “But I don’t think the president will be calling.”
Bardella largely avoided the pomp and parties that rang in this latest “new era” in Washington, though I did accompany him to a B-list reception a few weeks earlier honoring the 112th Congress at L’Enfant Plaza Hotel. When we arrived, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat, was addressing incoming members, reporters, lobbyists and various party crashers. “I hate her,” Bardella muttered as he stared down into his BlackBerry. Wasserman Schultz then shared that when she first came to Congress, “I was able to pass substantive legislation about Jewish-American heritage.” (Bardella, without looking up: “Give me a break.”) Wasserman Schultz concluded by urging everyone in the room to avoid succumbing to the “temptations” of Washington.
Bardella’s BlackBerry trance was broken by Karin Tanabe, a reporter then working for Politico who came over to introduce herself. Bardella’s swoon was rather egregious. I listened as he told Tanabe that he “worked in oversight,” which sounded like a surefire Washington pickup line to me (“Is that a subpoena in your pocket?”) until Tanabe killed the mood by saying, “Oh, my boyfriend works in oversight,” and the discussion ended soon after.
On Day 1 of the 112th Congress, Issa and Bardella headed down Pennsylvania Avenue for a scheduled appearance on Fox Business Network with Neil Cavuto. The interview was held at the Newseum, between the Capitol and the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, and the two went to the seventh floor to await their “hit.” They were joined by a slate of usual suspects that included Trent Lott, Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, Paul Ryan and Mark Kirk, an Illinois congressman who had just been elected to the Senate. Issa swept in, joining his fellow greenroom perennials, and the scene devolved into a bipartisan blur of back-slappy banter.
Lott, approaching Kucinich and Nader: “All right, which one of y’all is going to run for president?”
Laughter.
Kirk, to Kucinich, his now former House colleague: “You need some makeup, Dennis. Heavily need it.”
Kucinich was unamused.
Off to the side, Bardella stood spellbound by the privileged circle in front of him.
The spiral began for Bardella later that month, during a trip with Issa to Las Vegas, where the congressman was attending an electronics trade show. Bardella was ostensibly there to baby-sit Issa during an interview he was doing with Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker, who was writing a profile of the new chairman. Bardella spent much of his time demonstrating for Lizza how smart he was, and Lizza, in turn, wrote a lot in the article about Bardella, whom Issa referred to as “my secret weapon.”
“My goal is very simple,” Bardella was quoted in The New Yorker. “I’m going to make Darrell Issa an actual political figure. I’m going to focus like a laser beam on the 500 people here who care about this crap, and that’s it.”
Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the new top Democrat on the committee, sent a letter to Issa. “A profile of you posted yesterday by The New Yorker reports that you are using committee staff and taxpayer funds in an effort to transform your public image ‘from an obscure congressman to a fixture of the Washington media-political establishment.’ . . . In addition to characterizing the committee’s work as ‘crap,’ ” Cummings continued, “your spokesman openly disparaged the media.”
Yes, you could say that.
“Some people in the press, I think, are just lazy as hell,” Bardella told Lizza. “There are times when I pitch a story, and they do it word for word. That’s just embarrassing. They’re adjusting to a time that demands less quality and more quantity.”
Lizza also quoted Bardella saying there was a new development in his dealings with the media. Now, he said, “reporters e-mail me, saying: ‘Hey, I’m writing this story on this thing. Do you think you guys might want to investigate it? If so, if you get some documents, can you give them to me?’ I’m, like, ‘You guys are going to write that we’re the ones wanting to do all the investigating, but you guys are literally the ones trying to egg us on to do that!’ ”
In the bland landscape of On-Messageville, this was some earth-charring stuff. (And largely true, in many cases.) Bardella was in trouble. Sources in the House leadership office told me that top aides to Speaker Boehner and the Republican whip, Kevin McCarthy, wanted Bardella fired, but they left the final decision to Issa. “I felt like I had disappointed my dad,” Bardella told me.
Dad was pretty understanding, all things considered. He knew Bardella could be immature and needlessly combative. He could be that way himself, especially when he was younger. He decided to keep Bardella. He might catch some heat for a few days, but Bardella was worth the trouble.
Bardella received plenty of reassuring e-mails, including one from Juleanna Glover, a longtime Republican flack, lobbyist and hostess known for the parties she holds for People Worth Knowing at her Kalorama mansion. In her note to Bardella, Glover assured him that Lizza’s full airing of Issa’s past in the disastrous New Yorker profile would inoculate the congressman from future examinations of his sordid history — “especially,” Glover wrote, “since Issa did such a sublime job in answering all the questions.” (Indeed, Issa was sublime in explaining away the auto-theft raps.) “The piece turned out being a real credit to your boss’s intellect, insights and humanity,” Glover went on. “Thanks for that, Juleanna,” Bardella replied. “Appreciate your insight.”
Between December 2010 and February 2011, Bardella would forward me seven or eight e-mails a day. For instance, Bardella did not think Representative Jason Chaffetz would mind his sharing an irate e-mail about an article in Yahoo! News that the congressman had stumbled upon. Chaffetz, who is chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations, was not pleased that he was not informed about the article, which dealt with his area of jurisdiction:
“I would appreciate a review of how the committee and the subcommittee are going to work with our office. Did I ever get a heads up on this? I don’t think so, but perhaps I am wrong. I believe I am the chairman of the subcommittee with jurisdiction on this matter. Somehow, some way we are going to have to be better coordinated on this stuff. I find it unacceptable and potentially embarrassing for all involved. Also, why is this not even on the list of potential items given to me by the subcommittee staff?”
Most were from reporters or television producers and bookers. It was, sure enough, a window into how Bardella spent his days. Nearly all of the e-mails were pro forma requests to have Issa come on such-and-such a show, or Bardella reaching out to so-and-so to offer “guidance.” He was passing on, I sensed, the messages that best portrayed him as a P.R. stud not to be messed with.
For example, after receiving a request for Issa to appear on the liberal commentator Ed Schultz’s MSNBC show, Bardella was happy to blind-copy 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.”
He also delighted in sending me an irritated e-mail from the office of Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the ranking Republican on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Collins was upset because Issa’s office had released the 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.”
The next day, Bardella sent me a postscript under the heading “You’ll Love This.”
“Jen Burita, Sen. Collins’ Deputy [chief of staff] 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 Issa’s 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 when Bardella called, 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 Bardella had been copying me on e-mails. I had wondered when this would become an issue.
I knew Bardella had been boasting about the e-mail-forwarding, because a few people had asked me about it in amused disbelief. It was only a matter of time before it got into the media bloodstream. At one point I mentioned to Bardella that he should perhaps be a little less vocal about this, and he claimed he had not told a soul. I didn’t press the point. The truth was I didn’t think most of the e-mails were that interesting.
On the phone, Bardella kept asking me what he should do. He was hushed and out of breath and sounded as if he were hiding in a stairwell. I told him he could say he was not at liberty to discuss his participation in the book — or some righteous stonewall like that. He said that that’s what he did. Except what he actually told Sherman was: “Am I bcc’ing him on every e-mail I send out? Of course not.” At which point it was clear that Bardella was nailed. Any idiot would know he was bcc’ing me on some e-mails.
Sherman called me a few minutes later. We had never met, but I knew he was a good young reporter who had been covering the House Republicans for about a year and a half. I had been reading his stories (and, yes, a few of his e-mails) because of my interest in Bardella. We spoke mostly off the record. I confirmed nothing, which made me feel like a jackass, because he clearly had picked up the true rumor and my first instinct was 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 be unless Bardella released me from our ground rules — that I would not reveal details of our arrangement until after the book was published.
To a normal population of news consumers, a Hill flack forwarding e-mails to a reporter writing a book could not be a less interesting story. Few people even know what flacks are or why they exist (much less that P.R. expenditures account for billions of dollars in the gold-rush economy of the nation’s capital). But the news media is no normal population. It is an exceptional population: It cares deeply about itself and reports extensively on its doings. Washington puts the “me” in “media.”
The next day, I received a call from John Harris, the founding editor of Politico and a former colleague at The Washington Post. He said he was particularly interested in getting to the bottom of this Bardella story. Our conversation mimicked the one I had had the day before with Sherman: John wanted to know what was going on, I told him nothing while trying to appear helpful.
The one difference is that I had known and worked with Harris for years. Now we were on different sides, though united by our shared participation in the esoteric game: two socks tumbling in the same dryer.
The next day, Harris wrote to Issa demanding that he look into the matter of whether his spokesman was forwarding e-mails from reporters to another reporter who was working on a book about people who found this kind of thing interesting.
“It’s the start of what I’m sure will be a memorable week,” Bardella wrote on his Facebook page on Monday, Feb. 28. Politico’s Sherman and Cogan posted their first article on the e-mail-forwarding that evening. It began: “Representative 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.”
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 because 1) that would violate my ground rules with Bardella, 2) it would be partaking of a political exercise and 3) “refusing to cooperate” with the authority is the badass thing for a reporter do.
The next few days swirled. Roughly 150 stories were written about l’affaire Bardella in the 72 hours after the original “bombshell” was posted on Politico. (Politico would run seven news stories plus numerous blog posts on the subject in the first day and a half.) Everyone in the Washington media lined up to give their “take” on the story that came to dominate capital chatter during a week in which Republicans were otherwise threatening to shut down the government and a revolution was raging in Cairo.
Mike Allen devoted a large part of the next day’s Playbook to the story. My employer, The New York Times, published an article on the Bardella matter, as did my former employer, The Washington Post. Many people I have known and worked and socialized with for years wrote columns and blog posts about the saga. The stories were all comically larded with “full disclosures” about how the authors were friends with this person or that person or, in many cases, me. In his Washington Post column, Dana Milbank (a friend) wrote, “If Washington’s political culture gets any more incestuous, our children are going to be born with extra fingers.”
The best distillation of the 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 early on 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 my hostage-video voice, I told him I would not help him in his investigation. Issa seemed to expect this and appeared to be just checking a box with his call anyway, a brief nonconversation that bought him the right to say he had talked to the reporter in his subsequent description of his inquiry. We spoke for about two or three minutes. I told Issa that I did not think Bardella was a bad guy or that his intentions were malicious. Later that morning, Issa called Bardella into his office and fired him.
New stories popped online. The Huffington Post’s political tip sheet said the following: “A book about the incestuousness of Washington — written by a man everyone incestuously calls ‘Leibo’ — incestuously got someone fired.”
People were talking to and about me as if 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 Jack Shafer, then of Slate, pointed out: “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 the 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.
Chad Pergram declared on FoxNews.com that the Bardella story would “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.”
The iconic tale dazzled everyone like a snowflake, then quickly dissolved.
A few weeks after Bardella was fired, I kept running into people who said they’d seen my name mentioned somewhere but did not remember exactly why. Bardella was finding the same thing. The life cycle of public disgrace had been reduced to almost nothing, and what’s left after it exhausts itself is just a neutral sheen of notoriety. Bardella received a call one day from a producer for CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360°.” They were interested in Bardella coming on as a “Republican strategist” to discuss how the so-called birthers were questioning whether President Obama was actually born in the United States. Bardella said the producer told him they were looking for “new voices” to put on the air. He said he would be interested. They did a pre-interview, he told me, but the birther spot fell through. They agreed to keep in touch.
Bardella and I got together at the end of May. He asked me to meet him at a cigar bar downtown called Shelly’s Back Room. He shared a private humidor there. I agreed to meet him in the middle of the day. He told me he had talked to some people about jobs: one with a conservative policy group bankrolled by the billionaire Koch brothers, another with a P.R. shop in town. He had also talked to Jonathan Strong, then a reporter at The Daily Caller, a start-up Web site that was co-founded by the libertarian talking head Tucker Carlson. Strong had worked on the Hill as both a staff member and reporter, which is how he came to know Bardella — who had forwarded me some of Strong’s e-mails over the months. One sequence in early February stuck out in my memory.
“Favor,” Strong wrote in his subject line. He explained in his e-mail that The Daily Caller was compiling some promotional materials for advertisers. “I have been tasked with getting some quotes from Members about how they read and enjoy The Daily Caller,” Strong wrote. “Is this something you could help me out with?” This struck me as cozy even by D.C. standards: a Congressional reporter asking a member of Congress to lend his name to his publication’s promotional copy. Bardella was happy to help. He asked Strong what he wanted Issa to say. “Just like, I enjoy reading The Daily Caller with some kind of mild variation on that theme,” Strong wrote. “I read it daily, my staff stays updated by reading etc.” Strong added that “my bosses are on my case about it.” He had his response from Bardella in minutes:
“Not only has The Daily Caller become one of Washington’s must-reads of the day, but it has found its place in leading a daily news cycle that changes throughout the day. I can’t tell you how many times my staff has sent me breaking news that originates with reporting from The Daily Caller — Representative Darrell Issa.”
“Epic,” Strong wrote back to Bardella two minutes later. “Thank you.”
After his firing, Bardella spoke to Strong about the possibility of working at The Daily Caller. Strong put him in touch with Carlson.
Carlson has a special zest for goosing the self-righteous posture of official Washington. “This is such a judgmental city when it comes to people like Kurt,” said Carlson, who had previously appeared as a contestant on “Dancing with the Stars.” Carlson called me in April for my opinion on whether he should hire Bardella. I was hesitant to get involved further in Bardella’s fate, but I figured it was the least I could do after getting the guy fired.
I told Carlson what he already knew: that Bardella was high-risk and high-reward, driven and talented and immature. He had a desperate edge and would have to be watched closely. Carlson invited Bardella in to talk about the job and hired him a week later.
Within a few weeks, Bardella was writing commentaries for The Daily Caller. His first was about Michele Bachmann’s expected entry into the presidential race. “As long as her candidacy doesn’t completely implode,” Bardella opined, “her very presence in the Republican field creates dangers for the more established candidates regardless of whether she wins or loses.” Bardella’s op-ed was quoted in the morning e-mail roundups, including ABC’s The Note and NBC’s First Read. People were reading what he had to say, sending him notes.
And, for what it’s worth, the communications director whom Bardella replaced at The Daily Caller, Becca Glover Watkins, had taken a job on Capitol Hill as deputy press secretary for a publicity-hungry Republican from California, Darrell Issa.
A few months after Bardella’s firing, Washingtonian magazine published a long article on Bardella titled “The Comeback.” From reading the story, it seemed inevitable that Bardella would be coming full circle soon enough. Issa was quoted saying that Bardella “always has a home with us.” In early September 2011, six months after he was fired, Bardella returned to work for Issa.
In his new job as a senior adviser to the committee, Bardella would not have any official dealings with the press. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s communications director, Frederick Hill, told reporters that Issa believed Bardella deserved a second chance, even though he had acted improperly. I first learned the news from Mike Allen in Politico.
Bardella remains with Darrell Issa today. He declined to comment for this story.
Original Article
Source: nytimes.com
Author: MARK LEIBOVICH
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