Brownie

For those of you without a TIME subscription, here is the entireinvestigative piece, which I exerpted on the main site. Read it an weep (and while you're at it, read this equally disturbing report from WaPo. Opening paragraph: "Five of eight top Federal Emergency Management Agency officials came to their posts with virtually no experience in handling disasters and now lead an agency whose ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks...") Wow. I can't wait to hear how the White House and their friends on talk radio and Freeperville spin this one...

How Reliable Is Brown's Resume?

A TIME investigation reveals discrepancies in the FEMA chief's official biographies

By DAREN FONDA AND RITA HEALY

When President Bush nominated Michael Brown to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 2003, Brown's boss at the time, Joe Allbaugh, declared, "the President couldn't have chosen a better man to help...prepare and protect the nation." But how well was he prepared for the job? Since Hurricane Katrina, the FEMA director has come under heavy criticism for his performance and scrutiny of his background. Now, an investigation by TIME has found discrepancies in his online legal profile and official bio, including a description of Brown released by the White House at the time of his nomination in 2001 to the job as deputy chief of FEMA. (Brown became Director of FEMA, succeeding Allbaugh, in 2003.)

Before joining FEMA, his only previous stint in emergency management, according to his bio posted on FEMA's website, was "serving as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight." The White House press release from 2001 stated that Brown worked for the city of Edmond, Okla., from 1975 to 1978 "overseeing the emergency services division." In fact, according to Claudia Deakins, head of public relations for the city of Edmond, Brown was an "assistant to the city manager"from 1977 to 1980, not a manager himself, and had no authority over other employees. "The assistant is more like an intern," she told TIME. "Department heads did not report to him." Brown did do a good job at his humble position, however, according to his boss. "Yes. Mike Brown worked for me. He was my administrative assistant. He was a student at Central State University," recalls former city manager Bill Dashner. "Mike used to handle a lot of details. Every now and again I'd ask him to write me a speech. He was very loyal. He was always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt."

In response, Nicol Andrews, deputy strategic director in FEMA's office of public affairs, insists that while Brown began as an intern, he became an "assistant city manager" with a distinguished record of service. "According to Mike Brown," she says, "a large portion [of the points raised by TIME] is very inaccurate."

Brown's lack of experience in emergency management isn't the only apparent bit of padding on his resume, which raises questions about how rigorously the White House vetted him before putting him in charge of FEMA.Under the "honors and awards" section of his profile at FindLaw.com — which is information on the legal website provided by lawyers or their offices—he lists "Outstanding Political Science Professor, Central State University". However, Brown "wasn't a professor here, he was only a student here," says Charles Johnson, News Bureau Director in the University Relations office at the University of Central Oklahoma (formerly named Central State University). "He may have been an adjunct instructor," says Johnson, but that title is very different from that of "professor." Carl Reherman, a former political science professor at the University through the '70s and '80s, says that Brown "was not on the faculty." As for the honor of "Outstanding Political Science Professor," Johnson says, "I spoke with the department chair yesterday and he's not aware of it." Johnson could not confirm that Brown made the Dean's list or was an "Outstanding Political Science Senior," as is stated on his online profile.

Speaking for Brown, Andrews says that Brown has never claimed to be a political science professor, in spite of what his profile in FindLaw indicates. "He was named the outstanding political science senior at Central State, and was an adjunct professor at Oklahoma City School of Law."

Under the heading of "Professional Associations and Memberships" on FindLaw, Brown states that from 1983 to the present he has been director of the Oklahoma Christian Home, a nursing home in Edmond. But an administrator with the Home, told TIME that Brown is "not a person that anyone here is familiar with." She says there was a board of directors until a couple of years ago, but she couldn't find anyone who recalled him being on it. According to FEMA's Andrews, Brown said "he's never claimed to be the director of the home. He was on the board of directors, or governors of the nursing home." However, a veteran employee at the center since 1981 says Brown "was never director here, was never on the board of directors, was never executive director. He was never here in any capacity. I never heard his name mentioned here."

The FindLaw profile for Brown was amended on Thursday to remove a reference to his tenure at the International Arabian Horse Association, which has become a contested point.

Brown's FindLaw profile lists a wide range of areas of legal practice, from estate planning to family law to sports. However, one former colleague does not remember Brown's work as sterling. Stephen Jones, a prominent Oklahoma lawyer who was lead defense attorney on the Timothy McVeigh case, was Brown's boss for two-and-a-half years in the early '80s. "He did mainly transactional work, not litigation," says Jones. "There was a feeling that he was not serious and somewhat shallow." Jones says when his law firm split, Brown was one of two staffers who was let go.

— With reporting by Jeremy Caplan, Carolina A. Miranda/New York; Nathan Thornburgh/Baton Rouge; Levi Clark/Edmond; Massimo Calabresi and Mark Thompson/Washington

God help us...

Tags: hurricane katrina, katrina, CNN, kyra phillips, media

USTIN, Texas — As those silver-tongued poets at the Pentagon put it, we are in a target-rich environment. One cannot — honestly, one simply cannot — pass up the Brownie memos.

The e-mails sent to and from "Heckuva Job" Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency during and after Hurricane Katrina, are too absurd, too please-tell-me-they-made-this-up awful. As Katrina sent a 30-foot wall of water toward Mississippi, Brownie, steeped in disaster relief work at his former job with the International Arabian Horse Association, asked a top aide the burning question:"Tie or not for tonight? Button-down blue shirt?"

Fashion was quite the FEMA priority under Brownie. On the day Katrina hit, his press secretary wrote of his appearance on television: "My eyes must certainly be deceiving me. You look fabulous — and I'm not talking the makeup." Brownie replied: "I got it at Nordstroms. ... Are you proud of me?"

An hour later, he added: "If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god."

After Brownie's appearance with President Bush at a post-Katrina press conference, the press aide spotted an emergency: "Please roll up the sleeves of your shirt, all shirts. Even the president rolled his sleeves to just below the elbow. ... You just need to look more hardworking. ... ROLL UP THE SLEEVES."

The only FEMA worker in New Orleans in the first days after the hurricane was Marty Bahamonde, who e-mailed Brownie describing the situation as "past critical": people dying, food gone, water going, the homeless and hungry massing in the streets. Brownie replied: "Thanks for the update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?"

Thanks for the update? Anything I need to tweak?

Three hours after receiving this message about hunger and thirst in New Orleans, Brownie's aide was on the food case, e-mailing colleagues on the need to free up enough time in the director's schedule for him to have dinner because restaurants in Baton Rouge were crowded and "he needs more than 20 or 30 minutes."

This prompted Bahamonde to e-mail a co-worker, "I just ate an MRE (military rations) and crapped in the hallway of the Superdome along with 30,000 other close friends, so I understand her concern about busy restaurants."

I guess all that would be a lot funnier it weren't for what the Pentagon poets call "collateral damage." But at least we don't have to worry about Brownie: The administration signed him up as a $148,000-a-year consultant to FEMA.

Our chief executive is a graduate of Harvard Business School, and his Cabinet is studded with former CEOs.

This was supposed to be the "management administration" — government was to be run like a big business, meetings would start on time, not like those slack Clinton years. These folks are giving management a bad name.

Back in Iraq, the $30 billion appropriated for the reconstruction of Iraq is running out. According to a New York Times article on the report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, "Officials in charge cannot say how many planned projects they will complete, and there is no clear source for the hundreds of millions of dollars a year needed to operate the projects that have been finished. ... (The report describes) an array of projects that went awry, sometimes astonishingly,like electrical substations that were built at great cost but never connected to the country's electrical grid."

After two-and-a-half years and $30 billion, electricity in Baghdad is on intermittently, just as it was two-and-a-half years and $30 billion ago.

So you figure, "Of course nothing's getting done — there's an insurgency, the country's sliding into chaos." Let's look to Afghanistan, where peace reigns. How goes the rebuilding there? Oops. According to The New York Times, a New Jersey company got the contract to build 96 health clinics and schools by September 2004. To date, nine clinics and two schools have been completed and passed inspection.

The company told the Times it is hard to get good help in Afghanistan — they have to use Afghani construction companies. After four years of reconstruction in Afghanistan, the United States has spent $1.3 billion, and according to American and Afghani sources, nobody's sure where the money is and how it's been spent — and the net result is between unimpressive and pitiful. The agency in charge, the U.S. Agency for International Development, says things are moving right along and defends its programs.

One of the funnier legacies of the Nixon administration was an accounting award named after Maurice Stans, a secretary of commerce and chairman of the finance committee for Nixon's re-election, who kept suitcases of cash in his office and pled guilty to five misdemeanors relating to mishandling money. In that fine tradition, the Bushies should establish a management award named the Heckuva Job Brownie Prize. It would go to the person who makes the best suggestion for improving government management — like, "Roll up your sleeves, it makes you look like you're working."

To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

blog

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2005

FEMA Chief Worked for McVeigh's Lawyer

by Fintan Dunne, BreakForNews.com, 10 Sept 2005

Disgraced FEMA chief, Michael Brown once worked for Stephen Jones, the prominent Oklahoma lawyer who was the lead defense attorney in the Timothy McVeigh case. 

And Jones is someone with a very interesting background himself. He has represented many ex- and retired spies, and previously worked for Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller and Donald Rumsfeld.

Jones has acted for former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the National Security Council staff.

But that's just the workaday rountine of a carreer mired in state security issues. He has defended cases involving allegations of terrorism, domestic subversion, espionage, electronic surveillance, wiretapping, and computer surveillance.

His bio states:

He was also involved in consulting work with various targets, defendants, or persons of interest to the Federal Government for alleged acts of terrorism in the Philippines, the Far East, and September 11. He has also represented individuals accused of disloyalty to the United States and/or the unauthorized disclosure of confidential government information or classified government information.

Of topical interest is that Jones was once a legislative assistant to Congressman (now Secretary of Defense) Donald Rumsfeld. And back in the last century, Jones was a personal research assistant to Richard M. Nixon, and represented Nelson Rockefeller's political Interests in Oklahoma. He also worked on Rockefeller's 1964 and 1968 national campaigns for the presidency.

It's an impressive biography. It must have made Timothy McVeigh feel that with representation like that, he had absolutely nothing to worry about.

Big mistake.

Almost as big a mistake as appointing Mike Brown to be head of FEMA.

If it was truly a mistake --and not just a clever contrivance, the more skeptical of you might say.

Because, in retrospect, Jones is now scathing of Brown's talents when working for him. He told Time magazine:

"He did mainly transactional work, not litigation," says Jones.

"There was a feeling that he was not serious and somewhat shallow."

Ouch.

Jones sang a similar song to the St Petersburg Times:

"He was average. Maybe that's the best way to put it."

Brown was pleasant enough, if a bit opportunistic, Jones said, but he did not put enough time and energy into his job. "He would have been better suited to be a small city or county lawyer," he said. Jones was surprised Brown was being considered for job at FEMA but figured it wasn't impossible he could have risen high enough in local and state government to be considered for a job directing FEMA operations in Oklahoma.

The agents quickly corrected him. This was a national post in Washington, deputy director of FEMA, the arm of the federal government that prepares for and responds to disasters around the United States.

Jones looked at the agents, "You're surely kidding?"

With ex-employers like that --who needs enemies. Not Brown.

Now I know that you 'conspiracy theorists' will be also saying to yourself that Stephen Jones might be a safe pair of hands for such a sensitive case as McVeigh's. Not to mention being safe hands for the many cases involving national security he has handled. You probably reckon he must be pretty well connected -where it matters.

Here's an example of this thinking:

Gerry Spence, one of the best criminal lawyers in the country, [and] Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz [have] also been highly critical of Jones' abysmal defence. One defence lawyer said he's seen lengthier defences for drunken driving.

Jones was paid, or paid off, somewhere in the region of ten million dollars by the government to "defend" McVeigh. A strong incentive not to rock the boat.

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30 sep 2005

"An aggressively liberal, smart, foul-mouthed irritant"... that's how Danny Westneat describes me in his column today in the Seattle Times:  "This story starts at the rear."  Danny writes about my "power-of-the-Internet moment", in which "the horse's ass guy could influence national politics" by breaking the story former FEMA director Mike Brown blames for his downfall (as well as incalculable suffering in the Gulf.)

Yes... I'm "an aggressively liberal, smart, foul-mouthed irritant"... but what I'm not, is a liar.  And that's essentially what Brown's attorney Andy Lester called me in a guest column on Accuracy in Media (AIM), echoing his client's congressional testimony that I made false and defamatory statements.

I suppose both Brown and Lester thought they were being clever -- in a lawyerly sort of way -- by dismissively referencing my irreverently named blog and simply saying the story was false, without further explanation.  In fact, the heart of the story the MSM picked up from my original post on HorsesAss.org (and in my diary on Daily Kos), is undisputed... that Brown's emergency management experience prior to joining FEMA consisted almost entirely of a decade serving as the Commissioner of Judges and Stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association.

I further alleged that Brown resigned from the IAHA under pressure, in the face of mounting litigation and financial disarray, an assertion that was not only corroborated by contemporaneous accounts in horse breeding trade journals and newsletters, but which has been repeatedly substantiated through investigations and interviews conducted by the MSM, most recently in a very thorough background piece in the Arizona Republic:

Brown's actions led to a flurry of lawsuits, a five-year suspension from the group for Boggs and Brown's resignation in 2000 from the Colorado-based association.

In a four-year span, Brown, a lawyer, amassed association legal fees exceeding $1.5 million and initiated a controversial legal defense fund for himself, which ultimately led to his resignation. The 45,000-member horse group, now called the Arabian Horse Association, was involved in at least seven lawsuits during Brown's tenure.

But of course, the circumstances surrounding Brown's resignation from the IAHA are immaterial to the fact that his was a patronage appointment that put an unqualified crony in charge of coordinating the federal government's disaster relief operations... and with disastrous results.  Mike Brown simply was not qualified to run FEMA -- an opinion not simply drawn from his razor thin resume or his incompetent job performance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, but from his stunningly inept effort to shift the blame during his congressional testimony.

Brown claimed that it was "ironic" that the story started with a blog named "HorsesAss.org", and it certainly was.  For who'd have thought that the "horse's ass guy" would have more credibility than the director of a top federal agency?

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rsn

…And Brownie, You’re Still Doing a Heckuva Job!

Written by Richard Rapaport

Monday, 10 May 2010 10:39

It was the Presidential aside heard ‘round the world, following the August 2005 Air Force One flyover of flattened, post-Hurricane Katrina Louisiana. Objects on the ground seem to resolve themselves at 5,000 feet and after viewing the damage from on-high, America’s “in-the-bubble” Commander-in-Chief, lauded his bubble-boy director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration, Mike Brown, with those wrongheaded, unforgettable words; “… and Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.” 

In front of a horror-stricken nation and a restive press corps, Bush lauded his Under-Secretary of Emergency Preparedness and Response who, in his dazed torpor, transformed “FEMA” into an acronymic for hopelessness, haplessness, helplessness, and the kind of political horsing around that led to Brown’s incongruous upgrade from head of the International Arabian Horse Association to FEMA Director. 

Mercifully, “Brownie” was soon put out of our misery, relieved of FEMA command as the extent of New Orleans’s growing agony and the paltry, paralyzed response, became clear. As disaster morphed into catastrophe, Brown’s corpulent, doe-in-the-spotlight demeanor spoke more eloquently even than those fateful words about the response to Katrina that illustrated just how facilely a once-great nation can abandoned its own.

Yet, impossibly, unbelievably, last week, there was “Brownie,” the self-same Michael Dewayne Brown, poster-child for good-ole-boy, Bush-era dolor, returning for a rancid encore. After five years of semi-exile, “Brownie” seemed, at least in his own mind, to have ridden out the shame, atoning for his sins more or less quietly, if you don’t count his 7:00-10: p.m. right-wing radio talkfest on Denver’s KOA, 850 am. Yet some things never change, such as his proud trumpeting of congenital ignorance, which suggested that while “Brownie” may be a headless horseman, he is one still capable of toting up major face time on Fox, CNN and MSNBC. “Brownie” was back, and in full commentatorial flood, discoursing on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill with such pathologically dissociative suggestions as his comment, stated with a breathless absence of irony, that the Gulf oil spill “is like Katrina all over again, because people at the top are not paying attention.” Say what?

Forgiveness, even of the self-referential kind, can sometimes be a healthy diversion. But for Mike Brown to shamelessly flash his own culpability as some kind of golden ticket to pundit-hood was too loopy even for Chris Matthews, a commentator of the “give them enough rope” school of political discourse. Matthews listened intently before dismissing much of what Brown had to say as “insane.” In perfect “Brownie” fashion, however, a sly grin snaked across Mike Brown’s thick features as he admitted, “the way you said it sounds crazy to me, too.”

Clearly, “Brownie” could never claim to be the ripest Republican raspberry on George’s bush. But what exactly was he trying to prove during his recent spate of interviews, except perhaps the lack of judgment of cable news producers for even letting the man near a live microphone. In his interviews with Chris Matthews, Anderson Cooper and Neil Cavuto, Brown seemed to be inching towards the lunatic suggestion that Barak Obama had recently come out in favor of limited offshore oil drilling, so that when disaster struck, the President would be able to kill off the entire carbon energy business in America. The intimated, though never quite fully articulated allegation was that somehow, the Obama administration had its own evil motives and methods to blow up the British Petroleum drilling platform so that the President, according to Brown, could not only, “get rid of the oil and gas industry,” but also go on to “bankrupt the coal industry” as well. It was a bravura, zany line of reasoning, one seemingly more up Glenn Beck’s loony-tunes alley, but one with the built-in advantage of the deniability of having emanated from the mind of mad Mike Brown.

Could it be that in the face of a disaster weirdly resonant with Katrina that the Republican truth squad was able to convince an always-eager-to-please “Brownie” to test out a line of political thought that just might, in these paranoid times, provide fodder for the 2010 or 2012 elections. Or could it be that Brownie was simply trying to resurrect his bona fides to say, run the Department of Homeland Security in a Palen Administration? This may be a bit of a stretch, because of the Brown stain that is still association with Katrina. Yet Mike Brown’s performance may at least serve to remind us that disgraced political hacks don’t necessarily just fade away. Instead, they get invited back onto cable news to prove, as “Brownie” has, that he is “still doing a heckuva job,” even if it is not necessarily the one he signed up for.

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kos

FEMA director Mike Brown was originally brought into the agency as its general counsel, under the auspices of his old college roommate (and Bush fixer) Joe Allbaugh.  By now we all know that Brown is an emergency manager who knows nothing about managing emergencies, and a former horse association commissioner who knew nothing about horses... but apparently, he was also a general counsel who was hardly even a real lawyer.

In a devastating expose published today in The New Republic, University of Colorodo-Boulder law professor Paul Campos determines to answer the question "of exactly what, given Brown's real biography, he is qualified to do."  The answer, not surprisingly, is very little.

To understand the Mike Brown saga, one has to know something about the intricacies of the legal profession, beginning with the status of the law school he attended. Brown's biography on FEMA's website reports that he's a graduate of the Oklahoma City University School of Law. This is not, to put it charitably, a well-known institution. For example, I've been a law professor for the past 15 years and have never heard of it. Of more relevance is the fact that, until 2003, the school was not even a member of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS)--the organization that, along with the American Bar Association, accredits the nation's law schools. Most prospective law students won't even consider applying to a non-AALS law school unless they have no other option, because many employers have a policy of not considering graduates of non-AALS institutions. So it's fair to say that Brown embarked on his prospective legal career from the bottom of the profession's hierarchy.

According to Campos, Brown received his J.D. in 1981, and spent the next couple years representing the interests of a "prominent local family" in Enid, Oklahoma, followed by an 18-month stint at a local law firm (that no longer exists.)  But it appears that by 1987 he had already more or less abandoned his legal career.  From 1991 to 2001 he served as commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a full-time position from which he resigned under pressure.

What, then, are we to make of the claim in Brown's FEMA biography that, prior to joining the Agency, he had spent most of his professional career practicing law in Colorado? Normally, an attorney practicing law in a state for ten years would have left a record of his experience in public documents. But just about the only evidence of Brown's Colorado legal career is the Web page he submitted to Findlaw.com, an Internet site for people seeking legal representation. There, he lists himself as a member of the "International Arabian Horse Association Legal Dept." and claims to be competent to practice law across a dizzying spectrum of specialties--estate planning, family law, employment law for both plaintiffs and defendants, real-estate law, sports law, labor law, and legislative practice. With all this expertise, it's all the more striking that one can't find any other evidence of Brown's legal career in Colorado.

Campos further deconstructs Brown's FEMA bio, which he impressively claims to have served as "a bar examiner on ethics and professional responsibility for the Oklahoma Supreme Court and as a hearing examiner for the Colorado Supreme Court."  Campos' translation?

In Oklahoma, he graded answers to bar exam questions, and, in Colorado, he volunteered to serve on the local attorney disciplinary board.

Ouch.

Campos' summation is equally devastating, and a pointed critique of the Bush administration.

When Brown left the iaha four years ago, he was, among other things, a failed former lawyer--a man with a 20-year-old degree from a semi-accredited law school who hadn't attempted to practice law in a serious way in nearly 15 years and who had just been forced out of his job in the wake of charges of impropriety. At this point in his life, returning to his long-abandoned legal career would have been very difficult in the competitive Colorado legal market. Yet, within months of leaving the IAHA , he was handed one of the top legal positions in the entire federal government: general counsel for a major federal agency. A year later, he was made its number-two official, and, a year after that, Bush appointed him director of FEMA.

It's bad enough when attorneys are named to government jobs for which their careers, no matter how distinguished, don't qualify them. But Brown wasn't a distinguished lawyer: He was hardly a lawyer at all. When he left the IAHA , he was a 47-year-old with a very thin resumé and no job. Yet he was also what's known in the Mafia as a "connected guy." That such a person could end up in one of the federal government's most important positions tells you all you need to know about how the Bush administration works--or, rather, doesn't.

Once again, this has always been a story about cronyism, and the human lives it may have cost.  And now we know that not only did Brown lack the qualifications to lead FEMA, he also lacked the legal qualifications to serve as its general counsel, his first position at the agency.  It's not just Brown who should be fired... it's the incompetent president who appointed him.

Cross-posted at [HorsesAss.org]