Duck and Cover

The ports controversy has entered its "terminal" phase: blame-shifting.

The Associated Press reports this afternoon that three important cabinet secretaries, along with the President, have denied prior knowledge of the proposal to allow DPWorld to manage a number of major U.S. ports. The AP puts it this way:

President Bush, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and even Treasury Secretary John Snow, who oversees the government committee that approved the deal, all say they did not know about the purchase until after it was finalized. The work was done mostly by assistant secretaries.

For those who have spent any time at all in the federal bureaucracy, the above statement is a flight of fancy. A major initiative like this could not have been developed without the knowledge, consent and, most likely, direction of at least one cabinet secretary. What we see here is a game of musical chairs in which the last person left without a seat will find themselves out of the game. I can guarantee you, there are enough chairs to cover the posteriors of the principles mentioned above.

Several graphs down you can see the real struggle going on. There was an interagency working group of assistant secretaries charged with ironing out the details on the deal. One of them, at the Department of Homeland Security, has immunity protection in the game of bureaucratic survivor, probably in the form of an email chain:

Stewart Baker, a senior Homeland Security official, said he was the sole representative on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States who objected to the ports deal. Baker said he later changed his vote after DP World agreed to the security conditions. Other officials confirmed Baker's account.

The “changed vote” part of the story mentions means that while some culpability still attaches to Mr. Baker (he could have continued to object to the deal) he has snagged a seat because he at least sensed that this proposal might not pass the smell test and worked to make the package as inoffensive as possible. Baker gets a chair.

What the article does not delve into is who else served on the interagency group who might later be fingered as the tone-deaf political appointee who really “owns” the DPW issue. You can be sure that each an every person in this group has spent the last four days scouring through emails to develop a scenario which affixes blame to someone else while being completely exculpatory to them. The fight for the remaining chairs will be savage.