C.R.E.E.P lives!
Bush gave plum jobs to supporters who worked recount, paper reports
By CAROL ROSENBERG
Knight Ridder Newspapers
bayarea.com
MIAMI - John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, caused a stir in May by accusing the Cuban government of transferring bioweapons technology to rogue nations. Nineteen months ago, he caused a different stir - bursting into a Tallahassee library on behalf of the Bush-Cheney campaign to stop a recount of Miami-Dade County ballots.
Matt Schlapp, a former congressional aide, is currently White House special assistant to the president and deputy director of political affairs. In November 2000, he was part of the supposedly spontaneous window-pounding protest at Miami-Dade County Hall that brought to an end the first recount of Miami-Dade ballots.
Sue Cobb, a Coral Gables developer, today is the U.S. ambassador to Jamaica. Twenty months ago, the generous Republican donor volunteered her legal skills to the Bush-Cheney campaign - working as part of the legal team that contested recounts in Miami-Dade.
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_ Five lawyers who did research and wrote briefs to fight Florida court challenges are now deputies in the White House counsel's office.
_ Three senior strategists in Tallahassee now hold $130,000-a-year jobs as general counsels to Cabinet departments: David D. Aufhauser, now at Treasury, who supervised a unit of lawyers that ran Bush's military and overseas ballot campaign; Alex M. Azar, now at Health and Human Services, who was part of the so-called ``revolving brain trust'' that tackled different legal theories in Tallahassee; and Kirk Van Tine, now at Transportation, who came from Baker's Texas law firm, Baker Botts, to run a war room of bright young lawyers who cranked out various motions.
_Three members of the window-pounding crowd that on Thanksgiving Eve helped persuade the Miami-Dade County canvassing board to abandon the recount are now members of the White House staff: Matt Schlapp, now a special assistant to the president; Garry Malphrus, deputy director of the president's Domestic Policy Council; and Joel Kaplan, also a special assistant to the president.
Schlapp and Malphrus, both of whom declined to talk to The Herald, were first identified in 2000 in The Washington Post as part of the Miami-Dade demonstration. Kaplan described his role in a lecture at the Harvard University Institute of Politics, calling the demonstration the ``Brooks Brothers Protest,'' a reference to the way the demonstrators were dressed.
_Former Texas Transportation System Chairman David Laney left his Austin law firm to serve as a ballot recount observer in Volusia County. Bush appointed him recently to the seven-member Amtrak Board of Directors, a federal post touted by Laney's firm as a ``leadership role in the transportation arena.'' It has no salary but pays a per diem and travel expenses.
_Kevin Martin, now a $130,000-a-year commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, was one of the first national Bush-Cheney people to arrive in Miami from Washington, on Nov. 8. He had been a deputy general counsel for the Bush campaign and before that worked for Ken Starr, the independent counsel in the Monica Lewinsky affair.
_New York lawyer Brad Blakeman, who helped organize protests in South Florida and appeared in one Associated Press dispatch at the time as a ``Broward County GOP volunteer,'' today is director of White House scheduling.
_Associate Deputy Attorney General Stuart A. Levey represented Bush-Cheney in Martin County. He was with Baker's Texas law firm at the time.
_Boca Raton developer Ned L. Siegel, long a generous GOP donor, has been nominated by Bush to serve as a director of the Overseas Private Investment Corp. During the recount crisis, he sued Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore in a bid to stop the manual recount of the troubled butterfly ballots on constitutional grounds.
_Private lawyer Marcos Jimenez joined the Bush-Cheney legal team in Florida and is now awaiting confirmation as U.S. attorney for Florida's Southern District. His brother, Frank, took two weeks of unpaid leave from his job as acting general counsel to Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, to assist the Bush-Cheney campaign in the recount battle. He was recently tapped to become chief of staff for U.S. Housing Secretary Mel Martinez of Orlando.
_Miami lawyer Mark Wallace, who fought on behalf of the GOP in Palm Beach County during the butterfly ballot brouhaha, is today acting general counsel at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, run by Joe Allbaugh, the Bush-Cheney campaign manager. |
