Mark Leibovich, chief national correspondent for the magazine, wrote this week's cover story about Kurt Bardella, who was fired as Representative Darrell Issa's press secretary after sharing work e-mails with Leibovich. (Bardella has since returned as an adviser to Issa.) Leibovich's new book, "This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking! — in America's Gilded Capital," comes out next week.
Is Bardella the most flamboyant example that you came across of incestuous Washington culture, or are there many others?
"Flamboyant" is probably the wrong word. But one of the things that compelled me about Bardella is that he never attempted that Washington pose of cloaking his hyperambition in nonchalance. People love to be sheepish in D.C. It's a winning veneer, shows you are above the whole game — even while you're playing it.
Issa fired Bardella when Politico reported that Bardella was forwarding e-mails to you and blind-copying you on responses in cooperation with your reporting for your book. Was it difficult to persuade him to do this in the first place? Were you turned down by other P.R. people you approached with the same proposition?
Nope, Kurt was the only person of his ilk (workaholic Hill staffer) whom I approached about being a subject. I originally wanted to follow Issa around for a few months, given his ascending position. But that was a nonstarter. And then, as I started talking more to Bardella, I realized that he was actually more emblematic and interesting to me. The e-mail thing kind of came up in a conversation we had about how Bardella spent his days. He thought — and I agreed — that they would provide a real-time chronicle of his day-to-day interactions, usually with the media. I knew it was a bit unusual and assume he did, too.
What was it like to be part of the scandal when Bardella was fired? Have you ever been written about before?
What was weird about it was that people actually treated this as a scandal — that it became the single biggest story on Capitol Hill during a week in which one party was threatening a government shutdown and a revolution was raging in Egypt. Politico alone ran seven news stories and many blog posts on the topic in the first 36 hours. I have been written about before, but not in a circumstance like this. It was all quite odd. I will say that it can be a valuable experience for any reporter to be on the other side of the phone or notebook once in a while. You learn firsthand how others go about their work, for better or worse. Plus, you can't help but become more empathetic in your own reporting going forward.
Did you feel guilty when Bardella was fired?
I certainly felt bad. It's never fun to be involved in an interaction that gets someone fired. Kurt is someone who overcame long odds, gave his life to his boss and achieved great success — and then, suddenly, it was all gone, in part thanks to me. I assume he would do things differently if he had a do-over. For the record, I'm not sure that I would. Bardella is a classic Washington story of a frantic rise, hard fall and fast comeback. And it all played out publicly at punch-key speed in a culture of very competitive and nervous people. Kurt says he learned a lot from the "scandal" and emerged a better person. From what little contact I've had with him since March 2011, he does seem to be in a better place.
After the scandal passed, Bardella was eventually hired again by Issa — he was able to bounce back.
People often say that Washington is a "tough town," and it is in many ways. But it's also an easy town. It has short attention spans and constricted news cycles and things generally run their course in increasingly short amounts of time. One working title for my book was "You Will Always Have Lunch in This Town Again." Right as Kurt was in the midst of his "comeback," I remember that Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist who served 30-plus months, had just been released from jail. There was a nice book party for him at Tucker Carlson's house. (I attended, by the way, mostly out of curiosity.) Politico did a video feature of him playing golf. Abramoff excitedly told me at the time about some TV project he was considering. He had moved on, and so — inevitably — had "This Town."
You say the e-mails Bardella forwarded were mostly boring. Other than the fact that everyone is sucking up to each other in Washington, did the e-mails reveal anything new to you?
Not really. Maybe that Kurt, then 27, was so empowered to speak so freely and confidently in his boss's name. But Issa did seem to give Kurt — mini-me — an unusual amount of leeway. That ultimately cost him, I guess.
Something that turned some heads about this article and your book is that the White House was peddling "oppo" on Issa. Do you know if they do that regularly?
Well, it was just one phone call from a deputy press secretary — Bill Burton — suggesting that I learn more about Issa. He referred me to a 1998 profile of Issa in The L.A. Times. So as far as I experienced it, this was not a very elaborate "oppo" operation. But yes, I'm sure the Obama White House — and every administration in recent memory — has done that for numerous political opponents, and vice versa.
This article made me never, ever want to report in Washington, at least on politics. Do you ever just think "that's it," throw your hands up and decide to move to Hawaii?
I mean, Hawaii is paradise, and Washington — while a nice place to live and raise kids — is not paradise (especially in summer). But the truth is, I love politics, I've been covering it about a dozen years now, and the story never fails to regenerate my interest. And Washington is the center of that action. Again, for better or worse.
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