The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Ruh-Roh

Posted on | March 1, 2011 | 3 Comments

This is bad news any way you slice it:

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.
Bardella has been cooperating extensively with the Times’s Mark Leibovich on the book, and Issa told POLITICO Monday that he would “get to the bottom” of exactly what Bardella shared with Leibovich.
Aides close to the office say Bardella’s job hangs in the balance of the internal probe.

While I’m resisting the urge to jump to any conclusion about the facts of the situation, if this is true — if Bardella was indeed sharing other reporters’ e-mails with Leibovich — it’s going to be hard for Bardella to keep his job. Those other reporters would raise holy hell about it.

In fact, for a congressional press secretary to be “cooperating extensively” on a project with one reporter might be seen as disadvantaging other reporters who don’t have that kind of relationship. But we don’t have enough facts to make those judgments, so we won’t.

Category: Congress, Darrell Issa

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