Another Bush 'Family Values' Hypocrite: CLAUDE ALLEN ARRESTED FOR THEFT AND FRAUD

Former Bush domestic policy czar Claude Allen (right) has been arrested in Maryland on charges of swindling at least $5000 out of Targets and Hecht's stores in a refund scam, the Washington Post reports this morning. When Allen was named by Bush as his White House domestic counselor a year ago, I wrote a profile of Allen for the L.A. Weekly detailing how Allen was "a notorious homophobe, a ferocious enemy of abortion and an opponent of safe-sex education who for years has been one of the AIDS community’s principal enemies," and explaining why his appointment was was "a huge victory for the social reactionaries of the Christian right."

To take just one example from Allen's repulsive resume, when he was Deputy Secretary of HHS: "Known as Karl Rove’s enforcer Allen wielded a heavy, censorious and punitive hand at HHS. In November 2001, [HHS Secretary Tommy] Thompson loyally toed the Rove-Bush line when he put Allen in charge of supervising HHS’s audit of HIV-prevention spending. Allen led an HHS witch-hunt that investigated all of the AIDS service organizations (ASOs) receiving any federal funding (like New York City’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis) whose staff members had disrupted Tommy Thompson’s speech to the 14th Annual International AIDS Conference in Barcelona; they were there to protest Bush’s lethal do-nothingism about the AIDS pandemic. These audits were designed to intimidate ASOs into abandoning AIDS advocacy. A number of ASOs, like San Francisco’s Stop AIDS Project and half a dozen other California AIDS-fighting groups, were ultimately purged from receiving U.S. funding by the Allen-led witch-hunt because Allen didn’t like their science-based sex-education programs. Allen ordered Advocates for Youth, the leading national coalition for safe-sex ed, audited half a dozen times...." There's a lot more in my L.A. Weekly profile of Claude Allen, which you can read in its entirety by clicking here.  (Left, Claude Allen's police mugshot accompanying the report of his arrest on the website of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Police Department's website.)

The New York Times report this morning on Allen's arrest this past Thursday says that the White House knew of Allen's legal problems in January, but kept him on to work on the State of the Union address. In the sanitized chronology provided by White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, as relayed by the Times:

"On Jan. 3, Mr. Allen discussed the incident with Harriet E. Miers, the White House counsel, and told her that he had been returning merchandise and there was confusion with his credit cards because he had moved many times. He assured Ms. Miers that the matter would be cleared up.Mr. McClellan said the White House gave Mr. Allen "the benefit of the doubt" because he had gone through extensive background checks before his judicial nomination.Within a few days of the incident, Mr. McClellan said, Mr. Allen told Mr. Card and Ms. Miers that he was thinking of leaving the White House to spend time with his family. But Mr. Allen decided to stay for a while because he was working on domestic initiatives for the State of the Union address, which Mr. Bush delivered on Jan. 31."

So, once again the White House's internal procedures are revealed as having all the efficiency of the Keystone Kops-- if McClellan's version can be believed, the Bushies took this bigoted religious right darling at his word, instead of immediately launching an investigation to see whether Allen was telling the truth or not. So here we have a guy who was stealing from chain stores while he was working on Bush's State of the Union address. A rather remarkable admission of Bush administration incompetence, I'd say.

Now that Allen has been arrested as a petty criminal and a thief, it's another example of the hypocrisy of the religious right and of Bush's pea-brained judgement in making this fraud his chief domestic policy advisor. And to think that Bush actually named this criminal to a federal court judgeship in 2003! (The nomination was blocked by the Democrats.) It's also worth noting that neither the WashPost nor the Times this morning has any of the detail on Allen's anti-safe-sex, anti-abortion, anti-poor past that my L.A. Weekly profile of Allen reported over a year ago.