brooks brothers riot bak

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BBR is a generic category of legal and electoral hardball/dirty tricks/voter suppression in 2000 election.

no merri

See also 2000 tag and plum

html justice prevailing

bak 2 22

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gop only recycles when it comes to dirty tricks

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new

Why is this Brooks Brothers riot alumnus attending Broward’s recount?

“I have many years of experience with recounts so they asked me to come,” Joseph Brendan Quinn said about his latest contract with the RNC.

Miami Herald

Published Nov. 16, 2018|Updated Nov. 16, 2018

LAUDERHILL — A Republican party operative from New York who made his name influencing the 2000 presidential recount process is back in South Florida this week on the payroll of the Republican National Committee.

Joseph Brendan Quinn arrived quietly in Fort Lauderdale from New York last Friday and made his way to the Broward Department of Elections in Lauderhill, as three key races went to recounts triggered by razor-thin margins. High-profile Republicans cried foul.

"I have many years of experience with recounts so they asked me to come," Quinn said about his latest contract with the RNC. He expects his contract to continue through the end of a manual recount.

Quinn was executive director of the New York state Republican committee in 2000 when the party flew him to Florida on a hearts-and-minds campaign intended to help Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush win the recount and not Democrat Al Gore. Quinn is most famous for allegedly leading the raucous upheaval outside the office of the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections— later dubbed the "Brooks Brothers Riot" — that some ultimately credited for the abrupt termination of recount efforts in the county. (Brad Blakeman, a Bush campaign operative, publicly took credit for starting the raucous protest, the Washington Post reported.)

Republican Party observer Tom Pyle, from California, center, demonstrates outside the Miami-Dade County’s elections office Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2000, at the Stephen P. Clark Goverment Center in Miami. Observers demanded to be allowed to be present at the counting of the 10,700 ballots. (AP Photo/Miami Herald, Carl Juste)

Now a private political consultant, Quinn's back in South Florida this week — this time in Broward County — on a contract with the RNC to observe the recount process, Quinn said Thursday. Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes has come under fire from Republican leaders including President Donald Trump who, without evidence, accused Snipes of trying to "steal" the election. Gov. Rick Scott also accused the Snipes administration of fraud, but provided no evidence, either. Scott's race against incumbent Democrat Sen. Bill Nelson is one of the recounts underway.

Still, numerous irregularities over the years have put Broward in the political hot seat. On Thursday, the machine recount numbers were rejected by the state after the elections department filed its results two minutes past the 3 p.m. deadline. Observers on both sides expect protests outside of the Lauderhill location on Friday, the day the department is supposed to begin its manual recount of the Scott-Nelson votes and another statewide race. A group of avid Republican supporters has been camped outside of the office all week.

Blakeman told the Post watching the recount on TV has been like reliving the 2000 presidential recount.

"I'm watching people play my role on TV," Blakeman told the Post. "There's a guy with a bullhorn from Scott's campaign, signs outside recount center. Even the verbiage of Scott, calling Nelson a sore loser, is the same."

Quinn's daily routine also seems to come straight out of an RNC playbook written during the 2000 recount.

Quinn spends much of his days in the observation room at the Broward Elections office in discussions with the group of half a dozen Republican political consultants, lawyers and staff from the Scott and Ron DeSantis campaigns. He then makes rounds, rubbing shoulders and trying to win friends with other observers and members of the media. Quinn even bought a cake for a Miami Herald reporter on her birthday, though she did not accept the gift.

Outside Broward Elections, Quinn befriended the police officers on duty, passing hours telling jokes and laughing. He spoke frequently with conservative protesters camped outside the police tape. "He wouldn't say much, just thanks for representing the party," Linda Schainberg told the Herald.

"It worked then, and they are thinking it might work well again," Blakeman told the Post.

Both Quinn and Blakeman were part of a group of about a dozen heavy hitters deployed to Florida by the RNC in 2000 when it became clear that the presidential race between Bush and Gore would come down to a few votes cast in Broward, Dade, and Palm Beach counties. The strategy, reportedly devised by Roger Stone, was to keep Bush in the lead with a three-pronged approach: legal efforts, the official recount, and winning the PR battle with continuous campaigning.

The Los Angeles Times reported at the time that Quinn was sent first to Tampa, then Fort Lauderdale, then Miami, then West Palm Beach, at one point becoming so frustrated with the many moves that he attacked Bush lawyer Kevin Martin.

"I threw a garbage can at him and threw him out of the room," Quinn told the Times.

Quinn ended up in Miami on Nov. 22, 2000 when, according to the New York Times and several subsequent reports, he led a sit-in outside the elections office after officials moved ballot reviews to a private room saying the many public interruptions were causing the recount process to take too long.

For Dade by Carl Juste/mhs, Office of Elections, County Hall, Stephen P. Clark Center, Downtown Miami, 11/22/00 — Republican party observers Brendan Quinn(left) and Bruce Tague (right) both from New York state joined the impromptu side-in outside the Miami – Dade County’s elections office. Republic observers demanded to be allowed to observe the counting of the 10,700 ballots. The Canvassing Board suspended the manual counting of Miami – Dade County’s ballots and will only count the undercounted ballots.

Soon the several dozen protesters were banging on the glass door of the elections office demanding to be let in. Many were paid Republican operatives, flown in by the party, later identified in a photo by the Washington Post. Quinn is not in the picture.

"They were banging on the glass with clip boards. We were afraid the whole thing could collapse," said South Florida attorney Joe Geller, who had walked in from the elevator in the middle of the chaos. "They were chanting, 'Let us in, let us in.' "

Geller, a Democrat and now a state representative, asked for a sample ballot he planned to use to demonstrate a flaw in the machine tabulation system only to be almost immediately swarmed by protesters accusing him of stealing a ballot.

"Then I was surrounded by all of these pushing, shouting, shoving, kicking, elbowing people," Geller remembers. He eventually got away with the help of a police officer who intervened. The protest had a lasting effect.

"People were nervous and frightened and upset," said Geller, who saw the canvassing board huddled after the protesters left the building.

Later that night, Miami-Dade elections officials called off the rest of the recount process.

"Violence, fear and physical intimidation literally shut down the counting of votes," Geller said.

About Quinn's presence in Broward County, Geller said, "I don't know him. I don't know what his role was. In general, if anybody who was responsible for that attempt to stop the counting of votes is back, that's a warning sign to beware."

— Sarah Blaskey

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https://www.tallahassee.com/story/opinion/2019/02/03/ion-sancho-roger-stones-dirty-tricks-helped-sway-2000-florida-recount/2742713002/

Through IRS filings made belatedly by the Bush campaign, some $13.8 million was spent in its “stop the recount” efforts. These same documents show the Brooks Brothers rioters were Republican staffers from Washington, D.C., flown in and out of Florida on private jets by companies such as Enron and Halliburton, and given free hotel rooms. Many were personally recruited by House majority whip Tom Delay and given their marching orders on those walkie-talkies commanded by Stone.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/paul-gosar/

raw reed

Messages leaked to the Washington Post implicate Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) in a plot to create a so-called "Brooks Brothers Riot" in his home state to block President Joe Biden's victory.

Woodrow Johnston, the vice president of political consultancy McShane LLC, told an undercover liberal activist posing as a Trump supporter that Gosar wanted to use the far-right Proud Boys gang to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election in Arizona.

"We might need to do the same here in Nevada," Johnston added in his message.

The protests that Johnston organized remained peaceful and did not actually disrupt vote counting.

Even so, Johnston's boss, Rory McShane, distanced his consulting firm from efforts to organize protests against certifying the election.

"I was unaware of these texts, but I know Mr. Johnston was not working on behalf of any client or organization," he said. "Our management team has met with Mr. Johnston. I'm confident he sees the error of what he did."

Gosar's office claimed that the Trump-loving Arizona congressman was not in contact with Johnston and denied coordinating any election-related protests.

The original "Brooks Brothers Riot," which took place in Florida more than two decades ago, was organized by Republican campaign operatives who successfully disrupted the vote recount in the Miami-Dade County election office after the 2000 presidential election.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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https://www.tallahassee.com/story/opinion/2019/02/03/ion-sancho-roger-stones-dirty-tricks-helped-sway-2000-florida-recount/2742713002/

no lnx

Ion Sancho: Roger Stone's dirty tricks helped sway the 2000 Florida recount | Opinion

Ion Sancho Guest columnist

Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho invited a group of local school children to attend the testing of voting equipment in 2010.

When 8-year-old Roger Stone’s classroom held a mock presidential election between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy in 1960, Roger told his classmates in the lunch line that Nixon wanted them to go to school on Saturday. Nixon had said no such thing, and Roger’s candidate, Kennedy, won the election by a landslide. It was Stone’s first dirty trick.

Stone has plied his stock-in-trade, the dirty trick (a harmless sounding term for lies and deceit) for over five decades, so it was no surprise five counts of his seven count recent indictment concerned making false statements. The two remaining counts reflected threats of physical intimidation, a tactic Stone would employ in the infamous Florida 2000 recount.

The 2000 Florida recount is the capstone of Stone’s career. He was not a supporter of candidate George Bush — at the time he was helping Donald Trump’s campaign for the New York Reform Party nomination for president— and became involved only when contacted by Margaret Tutwiler, at the request of recount head James Baker III, giving rise to one Stone's proudest moments, and the title of a current Netflix biography, “Get Me Roger Stone.”

On Nov. 21, 2000, the Florida Supreme Court had ruled that the recounts set forth under Florida law, Chapter 102.166(4)(d) F.S., could be extended until Nov. 26. The Republican strategy was to shut the recount down entirely.

In the words of Stone, “The idea we were putting out there was that this was a left-wing power grab by Gore, the same way Fidel Castro did it in Cuba.”

The fact that the Gore campaign was following Florida’s law on recounts was completely ignored.

Dade County, Florida’s largest county and home to the largest number of Democratic voters, began the recount on Nov. 22. But when election staff arrived, they found thousands of people, mostly Bush supporters, protesting the recount outside. Radio Mambi, a vehemently anti-Castro outlet, was broadcasting live at the scene, asking listeners to join the protest.

A Bush command center had been set up in a Winnebago across the street, and Stone, armed with walkie-talkies, claimed to be in communication with demonstrators in the building outside the 18th floor Supervisor of Elections Office.

There, a dozen or more well-dressed young white protesters were yelling and pounding on the doors in what came to be known as the Brooks Brothers Riot.Their actions intimidated the workers in the office. Fearing for their lives, the Dade County Canvassing Board stopped its manual recount.

These ballots, and those of Palm Beach, were sent to the Leon County Supervisor of Elections Office in a slow moving yellow rental truck convoy for counting – a process eventually blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 5-4 decision known as Bush v. Gore.

Through IRS filings made belatedly by the Bush campaign, some $13.8 million was spent in its “stop the recount” efforts. These same documents show the Brooks Brothers rioters were Republican staffers from Washington, D.C., flown in and out of Florida on private jets by companies such as Enron and Halliburton, and given free hotel rooms. Many were personally recruited by House majority whip Tom Delay and given their marching orders on those walkie-talkies commanded by Stone.

Their actions succeeded in preventing the legal and court-ordered procedures, which might have provided an accurate result for the election. Lies, physical intimidation — the darker arts of political persuasion employed by Stone and his cronies — had proven successful. For the first time in U.S. history, a state had been barred from completing its presidential election.

Reflecting on Stone’s recent indictments, I’m reminded of the wise words of the Scottish sage Robert Louis Stevenson: “Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.”

Ion Sancho was the Leon County Supervisor of Elections during the 2000 recount and appointed by the Florida Supreme Court as the technical adviser to Judge Terry Lewis. This account is an excerpt from his upcoming book about the Florida 2000 recount.

trms, paid by B-C comm sez IRS

tbtimes 2018 recount

...Soon the several dozen protesters were banging on the glass door of the elections office demanding to be let in. Many were paid Republican operatives, flown in by the party, later identified in a photo by the Washington Post. Quinn is not in the picture.

"People were nervous and frightened and upset," said Geller, who saw the canvassing board huddled after the protesters left the building.

Later that night, Miami-Dade elections officials called off the rest of the recount process.

"Violence, fear and physical intimidation literally shut down the counting of votes," Geller said.

...

video

11/18 playbook recycled

https://www.msnbc.com/the-beat-with-ari-melber/watch/gop-tactics-in-fl-recount-protests-lawsuits-false-fraud-claims-1369825859811

11/18 update (just saw some old footage, ppl paid and one tall blonde duane gibson guy clearly a crisis actor

https://www.alternet.org/election-03918/republican-operative-goons-are-trying-pull-another-brooks-brothers-riot-floridas

However, this time, it appears the angry Republican supporters of President Trump and Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who only leads by a shrinking sliver as absentee ballots keep getting processed—15,000 votes out of 8 million cast across the state—and is facing a recount, could not get anywhere near the ongoing ballot review inside the Broward County Election Center, which, like election offices across the country, has hardened security protocols following Russian hacking attempts of the 2016 election.

Nonetheless, an eyewitness to the demonstration described a scene of partisan vitriol aimed at Brenda Snipes, the Broward County Supervisor of Elections—who has been sued by Scott and is the subject of a Scott-ordered state investigation—because her populous county has been slow to report its counts; as well as the revelation that its apparently poor ballot design led to 30,000 people not voting in the Senate race.

“When I drove up to the Broward County Election Center, I saw all these rental trucks parked bumper to bumper and circling the front door,” said John Brakey, a nationally known election transparency activist who was monitoring how the county is using digital images of every ballot to verify the vote count. “I didn’t know what was going on. I saw people demonstrating. I assumed it must be Democrats.”

Brakey said there was one four-foot-wide gap between the parked trucks where people could enter and exit.

“When I walked through and got in front, I noticed that everybody had Trump signs, Trump buttons, Scott signs, Trump hats—it turned out it was a Republican bunch of protesters,” he said, adding that he started taking pictures and videos. Those photos show signs that said, “Don’t STEAL our election,” “FAKE VOTES don’t count,” “Supervisor of Corruption,” “Sneaky Snipes,” and the Hillary Clinton-like chants of “Lock her up!” and “Put her in jail.”

“I’m an American. I believe in the American way. What this does is it makes us look like a Banana Republic,” protester Bill Wheelen said in a Miami Herald video. “If their guy wins, it’s fine. If our guy wins, they do this. This has happened over and over again in Broward. You know what, I love Rick Scott. He should have fired her in 2012.”

“The police were there. It was a stalemate,” Brakey said, who watched for a while and then went inside the election center building to get away from the broiling temperatures. When he went outside, he thought the police might remove everyone, so he left through the only opening between the trucks to leave. “It looked like everybody could get caged by the police—and the only way out was through the exit or under the trucks. I went away.”

Why a Slow Count andTilt AwayFrom the GOP

There is an explanation for why the county’s vote count is slow—as well as why late-breaking additions to the vote total in Florida tend to boost Democrats—which Wheelen noted. But it is not because Snipes, who runs for her office as the county’s election director, is a Democrat. (Former GOP Gov. Jeb Bush first appointed her to office.)

Simply put, some large Florida counties are late in reporting their totals because the high-speed scanners used do not read every ballot. As a result, a small percent of the ballots—which have been mailed in from voters and must be counted—end up being duplicated manually, an elaborate and labor-intensive process. In Pima County, Arizona, where Brakey lives, the county uses a similar system as Broward County for this process. During its early voting this fall, Pima County’s official report said that 9,501 ballots, equal to 3.6 percent of the 263,327 ballots cast, had to be “duplicated,” because they couldn’t be read by ES&S scanners.

In other words, Wheelen is correct that there is a structural issue behind the slow processing of Broward’s vote. But it is not caused by partisan election administration; it is caused by the technology used. However, the reason that these late-counted absentee ballots tend to favor Democrats is the counties with longest delays tend to be the most populous counties—which is where Florida’s greatest concentration of Democrats live.

But those shouting “lock her up” are not about to stop and think about what is really causing the vote counting delays and incremental shifts favoring Democrats. In any event, the vote counting continues, to be followed by a recount under state law.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

lady in red?

https://www.rollcall.com/news/-200577-1.html

Elizabeth Brotherton

@ebrotherton

Heard on the Hill: Stay Classy, Capitol HillHeard on the Hill: Nothing but a Good TimeHeard on the Hill: A Sign of the Times

When newlywed Layna McConkey Peltierheaded to Miami in fall 2000, she expected to stay for three days.

She wound up staying three weeks and became a part of history.

Peltier was among those photographed in a moment dubbed the “Brooks Brothers riot.” The Nov. 19 incident happened during the 2000 presidential recount, whenseveral dozen sharply dressed people, many of them GOP aides, protested a decision by the local election board to move the recount into a small, closed-off area. Dozens were involved, but it lives on for a handful of the protesters captured in a famous Reuters photo. So where are they now?

Kevin Smith is communications director to presumptive Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

Garry Malphrus, then a top Senate Judiciary Committee staffer, is a board member with the Board of Immigration Appeals. National Republican Congressional Committee aide Rory Cooper is at the Heritage Foundation; House staffer Duane Gibson is a consultant for the Livingston Group.

Tom Pyle, a former staffer for ex-Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), serves in a non-partisan role as president of the Institute for Energy Research. That’s not the only change. “I have less hair and my clothes have shrunk,” he jokes.

Matt Schlapp became President George W. Bush’s political director and is now a principal at Cove Strategies. Then a Bush campaign aide, he didn’t intend on getting photographed, explaining he “was in the photo as more of an attempt to make sure everyone stayed within the bounds.”

“I can understand why it still lives on because it really did capture a unique American political moment,” he says.

For Peltier, the recount came weeks after her wedding. She missed the first Thanksgiving with her husband but has no regrets. “Republicans or Democrats, no one’s vote should not be counted,” she says.

Peltier later worked as a lobbyist, and these days lives in Minnesota with her family.

“I hated to leave, but ... I had three kids in three years. That had become a full-time job,” she says. “These three little people are pretty cool.”

Bush Recount Troops Land Plum D.C. Jobs

Many of president's appointees fought Gore's bid to take Florida, White House

by Carol Rosenberg, July 14, 2002

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.

Although they now serve President George W. Bush in sharply different roles, the three share a common experience. They are among more than 50 political appointees found by The Herald to have served as troops in the frantic Florida recount battle that followed the Nov. 7, 2000 election.

Political patronage has long been a reward for campaign loyalty. But the distribution of plum jobs to those who worked in Florida after the 2000 election suggests that service became a kind of political merit badge that carried a special benefit.

''Work on the recount is the indispensable connection for work at the Bush administration,'' said Jeffrey Toobin, author of Too Close to Call: The 36-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election.

Just how many Bush appointees actually served the Bush-Cheney campaign here is not clear. The White House declined to provide a list of who in the administration actually worked for the campaign in Florida. Florida lawyer Barry Richard, a Democrat who was hired by the Bush campaign to fight its legal battle over the recount, said there were 192 lawyers of record on various court cases around the state.

To identify the appointees, The Herald conducted dozens of interviews and studied White House nominations and government staff directories --then matched names to news accounts, photo captions and several books about the episode. In addition, some appointees included their recount roles in news releases, or accounts in university and law journals.

LAWYERS IN KEY ROLES

White House says Bush tapped `bright minds'

Most were lawyers who worked all-nighters in Tallahassee and across South Florida as ballot observers and political operatives as well as litigators and behind-the-scenes writers of legal briefs.

White House officials defended the appointments, noting that many appointees take big pay cuts when they move into government jobs. Appointees with Florida service to the Bush-Cheney recount effort make from $52,300 a year to 166,700 for Attorney General John Ashcroft, who also passed through Tallahassee during the recount.

''The finest legal minds in the country were brought in on both sides,'' saidWhite House spokeswoman Jeanie Mamo. ``It's only logical that an administration would tap some of those same bright minds to hold legal positions throughout the administration.''

Mamo, a former Capitol Hill press secretary who now earns $62,760, was among those who came to Florida for the recount. Already with the Bush-Cheney campaign, she worked as part of the GOP's media team. Other GOP press aides who went from the Florida recount to the White House includeNicolle Devenish, Tucker Eskew, Ken Lisaius and Scott McClellan.

Several of the people who served as political operatives and attorneys said there was no explicit quid pro quo in their decision to come to Florida to do battle with the forces of Democratic candidates Al Gore and Joe Lieberman. But they also acknowledged that the service helped them draw the attention of the Bush team.

Lawyer R. Ted Cruz, a Bush-Cheney campaign worker and former clerk to U.S. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, arrived in Tallahassee for the first time in his life within 24 hours of the election to work on briefs. He became part of an early inner circle that included more nationally prominent Republican lawyers such as George J. Terwilliger III and Benjamin L. Ginsberg, who had been an outside counsel to the campaign.

''It did give an opportunity for lawyers who had been supporting Bush to shine, to demonstrate what they were capable of,'' Cruz said. ``On a day-to-day basis, a campaign does not deal with senior constitutional litigators that often. It was an opportunity for the senior people on the campaign to see firsthand the abilities of these lawyers.''

Today, Cruz is director of policy and planning at the Federal Trade Commission, earning $138,200. Earlier, he did a stint as a Bush administration lawyer at the Justice Department, working on the transition to Ashcroft from former Attorney General Janet Reno.

WORKING `BY INSTINCT'

Diplomat says he received no assurance of a reward

Bolton, the U.S. diplomat now responsible for arms control issues, said no payoff was promised for his decision to join the post-election fray. He had worked for the first Bush administration and, finding himself in South Korea on election night, contacted former Secretary of State James Baker in Texas to see how he might lend a hand. The reply: Go to Florida.

''I think, frankly, most of the people who did it just went down there by instinct,'' Bolton said. He said he received no legal fees, although the campaign paid his hotel bills and other expenses.

Bolton was part of the legal team and a ballot observer in Palm Beach County. Then he rushed to Tallahassee as the recount battle reached higher courts. It was his role, on Saturday, Dec. 9, 2000, to burst into a library where workers were recounting Miami-Dade ballots andrelay news of the U.S. Supreme Court's stay in the on-again, off-again presidential recount.

''I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count,'' he was quoted as saying in news reports at the time.

The Florida fraternity included major figures in the Bush administration, notably Theodore Olson, the current solicitor general, who worked on the case in both Tallahassee and Miami, then argued candidate Bush's case before the U.S. Supreme Court, and Robert Zoellick, now the U.S. trade representative, who served as a virtual chief of staff to Baker, Bush's main Florida strategist.

TEAM WAS VERSATILE

Roles included researching, writing and demonstrating

But there are many whose roles in Florida went largely unremarked on at the time:

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, supervised a unit of lawyers that ran Bush's military and overseas ballot campaign; Alex M. Azar, now at Health and Human Services, was part of the so-called ''revolving brain trust'' that tackled different legal theories in Tallahassee; and Kirk Van Tine, now at Transportation, 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.

â?¢ 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 Amtrak's seven-member board of directors. The directorship is 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.

â?¢ 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.

â?¢ 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.

â?¢ Associate Deputy Attorney General Stuart A. Levey represented Bush-Cheney in Martin County. He was with Baker's Texas law firm at the time.

â?¢ Boca Raton developer Ned L. Siegel, long a generous donor to the GOP, 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.

â?¢ Private lawyer Marcos JimÃ©nez 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 becomechief of staff for U.S. Housing Secretary Mel Martinez of Orlando.

â?¢ 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.

DEMOCRAT AMONG THEM

He takes 'less cynical' view of the Bush appointments

Many of the lawyers who worked in Florida are members of The Federalist Society, a network of legal conservatives who, in a string of telephone calls, summoned former Supreme Court clerks and other experts to Florida.

Barry Richard, the Democrat from the Greenberg Traurig law firm who was hired for the recount by the Bush-Cheney campaign, said he is not surprised that the path to posts in the Bush administration wound through Florida.

''The less cynical way and probably more legitimate way to see this is that the reason these people are around [Bush] is because he thought they were good at what they did,'' Richard said.

``Almost all the individuals who went into the administration --maybe all of them -- were involved in the Bush campaign during the campaign itself and were also longtime participants with the Republican Party. And I think that probably their involvement with the administration was not related to their participation in the litigation itself but their connection to the Bush team.''

As for his own role in the recount, Richard said no one ever suggested that his work would win him a Bush administration post.

''Nobody offered me anything,'' he said, ``and I never expressed any interest in anything.''

Carol Rosenberg: mailto:crosenberg@herald.com

Source: http://www.miami.com/mld/miami/news/nation/3656186.htm

trms town hall alum http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26315908/vp/32337799#32337799

Miami 'Riot' Squad: Where Are They Now?

By Al Kamen

Monday, January 24, 2005; Page A13

As we begin the second Bush administration, let's take a moment to reflect upon one of the most historic episodes of the 2000 battle for the White House -- the now-legendary "Brooks Brothers Riot" at the Miami-Dade County polling headquarters.

This was when dozens of "local protesters," actually mostly Republican House aides from Washington, chanted "Stop the fraud!" and "Let us in!" when the local election board tried to move the re-counting from an open conference room to a smaller space.

With help from their GOP colleagues and others, we identified some of these Republican heroes of yore in a photo of the event

Some of those pictured have gone on to other things, including stints at the White House. For example, Matt Schlapp, No. 6, a former House aide and then a Bush campaign aide, has risen to be White House political director. Garry Malphrus, No. 2 in the photo, a former staff director of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on criminal justice, is now deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. And Rory Cooper, No. 3, who was at the National Republican Congressional Committee, later worked at the White House Homeland Security Council and was seen last week working for the Presidential Inaugural Committee.

Here's what some of the others went on to do:

No. 1. Tom Pyle, who had worked for Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), went private sector a few months later, getting a job as director of federal affairs for Koch Industries.

No. 7. Roger Morse, another House aide, moved on to the law and lobbying firm Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds. "I was also privileged to lead a team of Republicans to Florida to help in the recount fight," he told a legal trade magazine in a 2003 interview.

No. 8. Duane Gibson, an aide on the House Resources Committee, was a solo lobbyist and formerly with the Greenberg Traurig lobby operation. He is now with the Livingston Group as a consultant.

No. 9. Chuck Royal was and still is a legislative assistant to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), a former House member.

No. 10. Layna McConkey Peltier, who had been a Senate and House aide and was at Steelman Health Strategies during the effort, is now at Capital Health Group.

2001-

Capitol Health Group

Revolving Door Personnel: (5)

Lobbyist