Did Kerick really have a nanny?

Mystery woman used as excuse for Homeland Security nomination withdrawal may not exist.


"The White House has been unwilling to discuss any specifics of the nanny herself..."

It's easy to see why the White House needed this diversionary excuse, real or not, for Kerick's departure. Deep questions concerning the former nominee's personal, professional, and business practices have flooded New York newspapers in the week since the withdrawal.

Two blogs are really keeping track of the juice on Kerick, Talking Points Memo and Steve Gilliard.

Gilliard has many postings including this one that contains a laundry list of his dealings:

Kerick...

*had mystery dealings with companies for contracts which didn't make sense

*slept with a subordinate, then punished supervisors who admonished her

*had work done by Paulie Walnuts and his crew on an apartment he couldn't afford

*rented an apartment in the shadows of Ground Zero as a love shack

*borrowed $18k from friends which he never reported

*was wanted for arrest over a condo deal

*associated with people linked to organized crime

*left Iraq after 3 months and failing to train the police

*allegedly threatened a second mistress and stalked her.

...All while running New York's City jails and police department.

I'd like to expand for a moment on Kerick's Iraq tenure and this interesting post by Josh Marshall in Talking Points Memo. Marshall points out that Kerick was in the thick of the wild early days of the US regime in Iraq then known as the Coalition Provisional Authority. In May 2003, Bush sent him to Baghdad to run the Interior Ministry. Before he left there just three months later, well short of the effort to which he had originally committed, he had he spent 1.2 billion taxpayer dollars to train Iraqi police. Into a country awash in small arms, he imported revolvers and Kalashnikov rifles for the Iraqi police from vendors in Jordan at exorbitant cost to the US taxpayer.

Marshall writes,

It's been known for a longtime that the Iraqi Interior Ministry under the CPA was rife with corruption. Lots and lots of US tax dollars went missing.

In November 2003, Deep Blade Journal issued its extensive Reference Article on U.S.-Iraq Business Relationships which included the comment, "...there seems to be deep distrust of the financial management of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Numerous articles and reports have appeared in the last few weeks that raise a plethora of serious questions about the conduct of the occupation...."

In one of those articles, Spending On Iraq Sets Off Gold Rush: Lawmakers Fear U.S. Is Losing Control of Funds, Jonathan Weisman and Anitha Reddy of the Washington Post reported on Thursday, October 9, 2003 that

Among the dozens of projects in the proposal is a State Department plan to spend $800 million to build a large training facility for a new Iraqi police force. Management fees alone would run $26 million a month, while 1,500 police trainers would cost $240,000 each per year, or $20,000 each per month. DynCorp of Reston is likely to get the contract.

"All I can say is it's mind-boggling," James Lyons, a former military subcontractor in Bosnia, said of the opportunities for private contractors. "People must be drooling."

Kerick apparently was well suited, for a while anyway, to help initiate the taxpayer sink hole that the colonial project in Iraq represents. A full investigation of Kerick and the disaster he helped spawn clearly is called for.