This Town (20 page)

As the summer progressed and lawmakers hit the campaign trail, Democrats began focusing more and more on the prospect of a subpoena-packing Issa taking over the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. At least two Democratic political enterprises—the White House and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—were circulating fat opposition files on Issa. “Opposition files,” or “oppo,” is the political term of art for a cache of unflattering material on the designated “opponent.” Oppo about Issa always begins with a
Los Angeles Times
exposé that was published during his unsuccessful campaign for the Senate in 1998. The story details Issa’s checkered history during what he describes as “a colorful youth”—a period that apparently stretched well into his twenties. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor gun charge in 1972 (he was carrying an unlicensed pistol) and, with his brother William, was indicted on
felony charges related to car thefts in 1972 and 1980. The charges were never pursued for lack of evidence. Issa calls himself a victim of guilt by association and blames his brother. The
Los Angeles Times
piece also includes, among other things, harrowing accounts of Issa allegedly threatening a business associate with a gun and a detailed description of a very suspicious fire in an Issa-owned factory.

Through his political career, Issa has always shrugged off his history as having been a “rotten young kid.” He also held an obsessive grudge against the author of the
LA Times
story, Eric Lichtblau, now of the
New York Times
. Issa has described Lichtblau as being a “
notorious hatchet man” and a “scoundrel.” (Lichtblau, for what it’s worth, now sits one cubicle away from me in the Washington bureau of the
New York Times
—and is a pretty good guy for a hatchet-wielding scoundrel.)

But I had no idea about any of Issa’s blotchy history until I got a call one summer afternoon from the White House, peddling oppo.

•   •   •

B
ill Burton, the deputy press secretary at the White House, called me at my desk one afternoon. Burton, an able cable surrogate for Obama during the 2008 campaign, has a breezy demeanor that can obscure a pit-bullish approach to the political skirmish. He was a top lieutenant to then congressman Rahm Emanuel in 2006 when Emanuel ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and his party wrenched control of the House after twelve years.

In his phone call, Burton wanted to tell me about Darrell Issa. As oppo calls went, this one was pretty tame. Burton asked me what I knew about Issa. Not much, I said. He urged me to spend some time “getting to know him.” As an hors d’oeuvre, Burton mentioned Issa’s auto thefts. Interesting. And kind of funny, since Issa made his nine-figure fortune selling car alarms. Not only that, but Issa’s car alarm product, the Viper, is the one that features a man’s deep voice warning would-be burglars to “please step away from this car.” I thought that was funny. It was summer, and I needed a story. Issa was timely, so I pursued it.

All went smoothly, although at one point my antique tape recorder jammed and Issa—a gadget geek and the former head of the Consumer Electronics Association—was kind enough to intervene. Issa was a smooth and engaging interview, though he twice launched into tangential assaults against Lichtblau, which went on and on. After I made an innocuous fact-checking inquiry with Bardella the next day about the old auto-theft charge, Issa called very agitated minutes later, suggesting that I have “that hatchet man Lichtblau” write the story for me, just to save time. Not necessary. I wrote the piece fairly straightforwardly: I introduced Issa to readers not familiar with him, and talked about how he was harassing the White House and positioned to become an even greater nuisance after November. There were a few cursory paragraphs about Issa’s criminal history.

To me, the most memorable part of this Issa excursion was meeting Kurt Bardella and seeing the Mini-Me factor at work. His adoring rapport with “boss” or “Darrell” (rather than the customary “Congressman” or “sir”) was unusual in its deference approaching worship. As Issa spoke, unleashing his practiced lines about holding the White House accountable, Kurt kept gazing up adoringly at his man. Kurt and Darrell even shared verbal tics, filling their sentences with distinctive “y’dohs,” a variant of “you know.”

You hear the formulations “He’s like a father to me” and “He’s like a son to me” quite a bit in Washington. It follows naturally in a place—a city of patrons—where so many career arcs turn on the uncertain axis of mentors and protégés, professional associations mirroring familial ones. These people spend so much time together and become so dependent that it’s only natural that some lineal bond forms. Tim Russert started talking like and mimicking the mannerisms of his guy, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “my intellectual father,” Tim called him. Russert developed such a killer impression of Moynihan’s urbane inflections and academic affect that he sometimes placed calls on his boss’s behalf without the other person’s (or Moynihan’s) knowing it was him. Once, Moynihan—the real one—placed a call to Ted Kennedy, and Kennedy abruptly said, “Fuck you, Russert,” and hung up. After Moynihan called back and Kennedy apologized, Moynihan admonished his impersonator with a simple refresher: “Me Moynihan, you Russert.”

Kurt went heavy into the Issa-as-father theme. He treated it as a genuine conceit, not some pat Washington cliché. Shortly after he arrived in Washington, Kurt had become estranged from Jim Nesser, the man he considered to be his father after he stopped hearing from his first adoptive father, Al Bardella. Nesser and Kurt’s mother had split up, his mother was struggling financially. She had her health insurance canceled and wound up taking a job as a hotel maid. “I had just gotten to Washington, trying to get my head around everything,” Kurt was telling me, “and my mother breaks down one night bawling in my arms, saying she has no idea how she’s going to make it. That kind of changes everything. I had to do everything I could to keep things together for her. I’ve been told I have a bit of a hero complex.”

Bardella and Issa bonded during a trip to New York in 2009, shortly after he joined the congressman’s staff. The new flack had engineered an appearance for Issa on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News. For a Republican congressman, scoring a Hannity spot is like winning a trip to Disney World—and big props to Kurt for making this happen. They couldn’t get a train or a flight, so Issa just drove. The round trip allowed for ten hours of captive car time for Kurt with the boss. That was the first time Kurt talked to Issa about his messy family circumstances. “Darrell was a good listener,” Kurt says, adding that Issa himself could identify with Bardella’s jagged line to D.C.

•   •   •

I
n November 2010, the Daily Beast’s
Howard Kurtz conducted a phone interview with Issa, or so he thought. He quoted the congressman accordingly—except that it was Bardella talking on the phone to Kurtz, not Issa. On the list of embarrassing reporter errors, this was a whopper, especially for someone like Howie, a longtime media reporter for the
Washington Post
who had spent much of his career covering the failings of his colleagues. It was made even worse because Kurtz pointed out in his story that Issa liked referring to himself in the third person.

But the Kurtz lapse also belonged safely in the “There but for the grace of God go I” category. It was the kind of boneheaded thing an overworked reporter might conceivably do, especially on deadline. After Kurtz’s story was published, Bardella sent him an e-mail informing him of his mistake.

Hey Howard—

Saw your piece ran this weekend, and I think there’s a little confusion. It wasn’t the Congressman you spoke with, it was me speaking in capacity as his spokesman—that’s probably why the “speaks in the third-person” reference you made was out there since it was me and not him. Not sure how we got our wires crossed but I thought you should know.

kb

Kurtz did not respond to Bardella’s e-mail and did not correct the record. This moved Kurtz’s error from the “understandable whopper” category to the “reporter possibly withholding information to save self from humiliation” category. Several weeks passed without anyone’s learning of the mishap. Kurtz would have avoided detection if Bardella had not mentioned the episode to reporter
Ryan Lizza, who was profiling Issa for the
New Yorker
. It was only after a
New Yorker
fact-checker called Kurtz and asked him about the error—six weeks after the original story appeared—that Kurtz acknowledged it. Kurtz blamed laziness for his long delay. He also claimed he addressed the other speaker as “Congressman” during the conversation but Bardella never corrected him. Kurt denied this to Lizza.

“I think anyone who knows me well enough knows I’m far too fond of myself to abdicate my own identity in favor of someone else’s,” Bardella said.

•   •   •

O
n Election Night, as had been expected, Republicans regained control of the U.S. Congress after a romp that netted the GOP sixty-three seats—a shellacking for Democrats, President Obama called it. While the political wise guys dubbed this to be another “change election,” Election Nights in Washington tend to follow numbingly similar rhythms in repeating venues. People will drink heavily on both sides, regardless of how the voting goes; like the Tea Party guy I met—who had obviously been drinking more than tea—stumbling out of the Republican bash at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill wearing a “Don’t Tread on Me” hat. Not two seconds after he handed me his business card, he proceeded to vomit magnificently all over the hood of a waiting cab. (“Don’t Puke on Me,” I thought.)

Bardella spent the big night working at Issa’s Election Night victory party at the Westgate Hotel in San Diego. As the new chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Issa was now unquestionably one of the most visible and powerful Republicans in Washington.

Bardella now legitimately viewed
himself
—not just his boss—as a news driver. Reporters would be 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 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 whole cycle might reverse itself two hours later when Kurt was ready to parcel out his next nugget.

He was beginning to feel ever more powerful, and was being loved accordingly in the form of flattering e-mails from reporters and television bookers eager to win his favor. “Is anyone on the Hill as good at his job than you?” one CNN booker asked Kurt in an e-mail. Sucking up to gatekeepers is reflexive practice among journalists.
Barbara Walters herself, the queen of the “get,” has elevated it to an art form. After landing an exclusive interview in late 2011 with the savage Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Walters tried to help Assad’s young press assistant get an internship at CNN and admission to Columbia University, according to e-mails that were made public by a Syrian opposition group. Walters referred to the twenty-two-year-old aide in her e-mails as “dear girl” and signed them “Hugs, Barbara.” The aide, Sheherazad Jaafari, replied that Walters “can never be a better mom to your adopted child (me).” She signed off, “I love you so much and thanks again.” Walters later apologized for her conduct.

Kurt’s higher perch empowered him to go beyond his usual portfolio. He took on little projects to sow mischief for the opposition. In the weeks after Election Day, Democrats on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform were in some dispute over who would be their ranking member now that they were in the minority again.
It was assumed that the job would go to Edolphus Towns of New York, who had been the chairman of the committee in the last Congress. But several key Democrats in Congress and the White House viewed Towns as an ineffectual chairman who was easily steamrolled by Issa. They wanted to jettison him for Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who was viewed as a much more formidable figure—something Issa/Bardella also believed, which led Bardella to talk as much as possible about how marvelous Towns was: “Just a terrific human being,” Kurt said, smiling, “someone who did an outstanding job as chairman. We just love Ed Towns.”

In the middle of November, a liberal Democrat on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Dennis Kucinich, went on Ed Schultz’s show on MSNBC and started criticizing Issa for making false claims about the White House. Seeing this, Kurt immediately called some Hill reporters and wondered if they had heard anything about Kucinich running for the ranking membership position. This was Kurt’s way of putting the notion into “the bloodstream.” He believed Democrats would never place Kucinich, a two-time fringe candidate for president, into such a visible and strategically important job. His candidacy would bolster Towns by turning him into a more reasonable alternative. It would create uncertainty among Democrats, which would in turn benefit Issa. Mostly, it was just fun for Kurt to feel he was manipulating the doings of Congress.

On his show the next day, Ed Schultz endorsed Kucinich to be the committee’s ranking member. At which point Bardella decided to call over to Towns’s office to give his counterpart in the communications office a “heads-up” about Ed Schultz’s endorsement. “It looks like Kucinich is trying to make a move on you guys,” Bardella helpfully told his counterpart. This was Kurt’s way of nurturing doubt in his opposition in the guise of being supportive. “If there is anything I can do to assist, please let me know,” Bardella said. Towns’s people were grateful for his offer. “We’re all on the same team,” Kurt assured them.

Towns then issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to Democrats on the committee to say he was running again to be their ranking member. Within a few days Kucinich put out a similar letter. Kurt believed he had something to do with this by talking up Kucinich’s candidacy and making it “self-fulfilling.” This all might have happened anyway, but at the very least Kurt believed he had made the principals “show their cards before they were ready to.” The drama created a distraction for Democrats that was “politically advantageous for Darrell.” In the end, the White House and Democratic leadership intervened and installed Elijah Cummings as the ranking member.