Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

The steamroller of bad news for the Weasel's appalling misAdministration (which will ultimately be a steamroller of good news for the country) keeps chuggin' along. In the latest development, David H. Safavian, the head of the the procurement division of the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB), was outright arrested yesterday (no more of that old namby-pamby "under investigation" or "under indictment") on charges related to the sprawling, but largely off-the-radar, Abramoff scandal. (No doubt his arrest is yet another example of witch hunting by the socialists and media elite within the ranks of the FBI.)

Excerpt:

According to court papers, Mr. Safavian, 38, is accused of lying about assistance that he gave Mr. Abramoff in his earlier work at the General Services Administration, where he was chief of staff from 2002 to 2004, and about an expensive golf trip he took with the lobbyist to Scotland in August 2002.

Mr. Abramoff, a former lobbying partner of Mr. Safavian, was indicted last month in Florida on unrelated federal fraud charges. He is not identified by name in the court papers involving Mr. Safavian's arrest. But "Lobbyist A" in an F.B.I. affidavit could only be Mr. Abramoff based on descriptive details in the documents filed in the Federal District Court here.

The Justice Department said Mr. Safavian had been specifically charged with making false statements to investigators about his efforts at the General Services Administration in 2002 to help Mr. Abramoff acquire two large pieces of government-owned property in the Washington area, including the historic Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The department said Mr. Safavian had also lied to ethics officials at the agency, which manages federal property, when he sought approval to accept free transportation from Mr. Abramoff for the golf trip to Scotland that summer. According to court documents, Mr. Safavian told the ethics office that Mr. Abramoff had no business with the agency at the time, an assertion that was repeated in a separate interview this May with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

[...]

Mr. Safavian had recently been working on developing contracting policies for the multibillion-dollar relief effort after Hurricane Katrina.

The Justice Department did not reveal details of Mr. Safavian's arrest, including where it occurred. The department also did not say why the criminal charges were brought directly by prosecutors, rather than by the Washington grand jury investigating Mr. Abramoff. The Justice Department often bypasses a grand jury when a criminal case is brought together hurriedly or when there is fear that a defendant may try to flee.

I'm in no position to judge Safavian's flight risk. But it does seem plausible that he needed to be rushed out of the way before he tainted the Katrina recovery program with overt scandal. Bizarrely, one hates to point out, Karl Rove has meantime been put in charge of the Katrina program; should an indictment (or, Deo gratias, an arrest warrant) land on his desk as well, maybe they can turn the whole thing over to Laura.

By the way, I've got a gripe about the NY Times headline over the story: "Ex-White House Aide Charged in Corruption Case." What makes him an ex-aide is that he abruptly quit on Friday, three days before his arrest. The "ex-" softens the blow unnecessarily, insisting in genteel fashion that, well, gee, y'know, it's possible that he was arrested for his activities over the weekend... The Washington Post, alas, doesn't use the words "crony" or "hack," but at least it doesn't use the "ex-" qualifier, either: "Bush Official Arrested in Corruption Probe."

(This post's title, incidentally, comes from James Taylor's "Steamroller Blues." Like the steamroller metaphor which opens this post, the steamroller in the song is only marginally associated with the blues.)