Cirque Du Salahi: Be Careful Who You Trust (19 page)

The message made their jaws drop and enveloped them in more of that surreal feeling which had suddenly taken up residence in their lives. Anyone abruptly thrown into the glare of the major media is going to feel as if they just woke up with a 10,000-watt klieg light shining into their face. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to imagine the crush of pressure brought by unrelenting media attention. Already, Tareq and Michaele were getting the picture.

Of course, for someone who enjoys appearing in public, small amounts of media attention are enjoyable at times. But if you are the subject of a major media blitzkrieg, the thing is—
there is never just one camera.
In fact, there are often dozens, and not in one or two locations, but anywhere you go, hovering and closing in. There are never just a few phone calls coming in; there are hundreds. There can be thousands. The target of the onslaught has virtually nowhere to go without being pointed out and harassed. It can be completely overwhelming, even for those who are comfortable with public attention. Nothing prepares a person to cope with the tsunami of a media gang-bang. In the case of the Salahis, the sunburn intensity of media pressure was magnified many times over. Whatever the answer to the question of a party invitation turned out to be, there had been a security breach involving the President of the United States—inside of the White House itself, of all places. This disturbing fact may have been the catalyst that fired up the media but the story immediately took on energy of its own.

A perfect storm of coincidental elements had converged. For example, the state dinner just happened to take place on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving—normally a slow news time. Everyone in media knows there is always that unceasing mantra, “feed the beast.” The business model rests on spewing nonstop information and in the internet world that discharge is immediate and often unfiltered. Even though there were still few details to report at that point, the full media lineup had jumped into the pool like kids with an hour of free swim: the “Big Three” evening newscasts, Cable TV, the internet blogosphere, nationwide radio news. The “White House Gate Crashers” took focus like a hot blonde in a great dress because … well, it featured a hot blonde in a great dress.

Of course the story had numerous engines propelling it, with the genuine issues of Presidential security and staff incompetence somewhere up at the top. And what did the media have to illustrate the story? That great videotape and those still photos; the famous images of Michaele and Tareq Salahi beaming while they were publicly introduced and then again chatting up the dignitaries. Each photo was another spoke in the wheel driving the story forward. The pictures were way more compelling than the attached news copy. A newsreader talks for thirty seconds and most of what gets said goes undigested or is soon forgotten. But the photographic evidence was burned into the public consciousness.

When major media saw how well the photos helped to draw eyeballs, they began a relentless pattern: (a) reissue the photos or rerun the video; and (b) repeat step a. The national audience could only cringe under the heat of the blast. Any insecure soul with hair darker than ash blonde felt their teeth gnash together every time the images popped up. The harsh visual taunts helped the story remain a lead item for days, and to remain a recurring item that endures as of this writing.

No outlet covered the story as intensely as the
Washington Post
. It was two of their writers who broke the first story, after all: Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger of the “The Reliable Source” column. It is a must-read for all those who sign on to the
Washington Post
’s website to get their news. Additionally,
Washington Post
staff reporter Robin Givhan also stood with Ms. Roberts to watch the guest arrivals the night of the state dinner.

It was just a short while after the Salahis left the White House that Tuesday night, when the
Washington Post
’s website put up a story about the state dinner. Tucked in the middle was this one sentence:

The most curious and unexpected sighting: Tareq and Michaele Salahi. The notorious Fauquier County vineyard socialites, who are filming Real Housewives of D.C., swanned in, even though their names did not appear on the official guest list.

The tip was phoned in by Roberts’ on-scene photographer at her direction, and given to Argetsinger who was working the desk at the
Washington Post
’s office that night. Amy made sure to include the line about the Salahis in their first dot-com edition report on the state dinner, but why she chose the word “notorious” to describe the Salahis is unclear. The “The Reliable Source” column has written numerous articles over the years about the Salahis and the fight over control of the family’s winery. Amy was reportedly chummy with a polo player with whom Tareq had a financial dispute, and she kept tabs on and wrote frequently on the website about the Salahis’ activities. Many of “The Reliable Source” items on the Salahis were seen as snarky in tone and unnecessarily so by those who read them.

Erik Wemple editor of WashingtonCityPaper. com wrote a lengthy story about the timetable of the
Washington Post
’s roll out of the story.

With their strange appearance at the White House, the Salahis were on the verge of breaking out of their blurby confines on the Reliable Source page and onto A1. The first step in that direction was an e-mail that Roberts sent to Argetsinger saying, in effect,
guess who’s here?
Argetsinger postulated that the couple had simply crashed the party, a notion that was slow to catch on with her colleagues. “No one I was talking to that night was willing to believe the gate-crashing thing,” says Argetsinger.

… Argetsinger couldn’t sleep that night because she thought other media outlets would be all over the story, eclipsing the small mention in the party summary that the
Washington Post
had just printed. In a preemptive strike, she threw a post on “The Reliable Source” blog early Wednesday morning, digging into the mystery and including a quote from the source: “Tareq Salahi told us in an e-mail overnight that their connection came from the fact that a team from India is scheduled to play the U.S. in his next polo tournament.”

Later that day, the
Post
secured White House confirmation that the Salahis had crashed the affair, sealing the story as a
Washington Post
exclusive. The gossip columnists then went their separate ways for the holiday, figuring they’d pretty much finished their business with these Virginia socialites. Then the 24-7 media biz crashed their party, requesting all manner of interviews and sound bites.

In newsrooms across the country it was decided that if the genesis of the Salahi story was the august
Washington Post
, then it was safe to repeat. The phrase “White House Gate Crashers” or “White House Party Crashers” was part of every news cycle and was said with such authority that the public had no reason to believe the Salahis were anything but criminals. The story flourished and was nourished by pundit comments every hour of every day for weeks and then months, in every type of media available.

The night after the state dinner, Roxanne Roberts appeared on two CNN shows back to back. Anchor Campbell Brown set the tone for her 9 p.m. hour when she opened her show with this announcement:

The president gets punked. How were these two wannabe reality stars able to crash last night’s state dinner at the White House?

It is surprising that Brown’s producers didn’t check with Bravo TV executives before her program. She was obviously not aware of the fact that Michaele and Tareq Salahi weren’t “wannabe” television performers. They had in fact signed contracts to appear on Bravo TV many months earlier. As the anchorwoman introduced reporter Roberts to her viewers, she repeated her mistake and made yet another false pronouncement.

… According to “The
Washington Post
… The President got punked by some reality TV star wannabes. Take a look. You will see this couple here. Well, they were not on the guest list, but somehow managed to sneak through literally layer after layer of security.

Notice that there is no attribution for Brown’s comment. Nowhere does CNN reveal where it got the information that the couple snuck through “layer after layer of security.” The truth was that Michaele and Tareq Salahi had provided their background clearance information to the Secret Service days earlier via e-mail, they stood in line outside the White House quietly waiting their turn to enter, and when asked, they presented their passports to Secret Service agents—not once, but twice. They were politely waved through at every step. Again, however, lesser media outlets came to the conclusion that if an organization as respected as CNN was reporting it—they could too.

On the night of the Campbell Brown program, November 25, 2010, Michaele’s mother was watching one of her favorite programs,
Criminal Minds
, when her oldest daughter Debbie called to tell her to turn on CNN.

“I said, ‘No! There’s only a few more minutes left of my program,’” Rosemary Holt remembers in vivid detail. “But Debbie was firm. She said, ‘Mom, turn it on! It’s about Missy—at the White House!’” Somehow Michaele’s mother had missed the day’s barrage of stories about her daughter and son-in-law. She tuned in just in time to hear Roxanne Roberts give the latest breaking news. The Secret Service was accepting responsibility.

They did a preliminary investigation today and one of the Secret Service checkpoints didn’t properly determine that these people were on the invited guest list. And then they got through … We have got two people who show up at the White House and essentially walk in.

The Salahis didn’t just “essentially walk in”—nor did they “sneak” in or “crash” but these words were used over and over. The Salahis were given permission by agents of the United States Secret Service to enter the White House grounds. Within a few days the head of the Service would issue an official statement confirming that.

Also appearing on the same Campbell Brown program was CNN’s National Security Contributor, Frances Townsend, who was the former Homeland Security Advisor under President George W. Bush. She accurately put her finger on what would turn out to be a major problem that evening. This state dinner was nearly twice as large as any previous one. “And I imagine the size of it and the chaos of everyone arriving at the same time and, frankly, the lack of experience of people who would have been helping the Secret Service at the gate contributed to this,” Townsend said.

Rosemary Holt sat alone in her living room in suburban Virginia listening, dumbfounded. She stayed tuned to CNN for the next program,
Anderson Cooper 360°
. He was replaced that evening by anchor, Tom Foreman.

They were intruders who slipped through levels of security checks and screens and somehow managed to get within feet of the president inside the White House. These interlopers also bragged about it on their Facebook page.

The Salahis’ joint Facebook page went up on the screen, showing their photos posing next to Vice President Joe Biden and other dignitaries at the party. Respected reporter, Randi Kaye, put on her most serious face for this story. Seemingly, no one inside CNN had told the producers of
this
program that the CNN program before them had just reported that the Secret Service was taking responsibility, and that it was likely a snafu that resulted from an inexperienced White House Social Secretary’s office not being present to help supervise.

KAYE
: “They went right inside President Obama’s first state dinner. Just one problem, this couple was, as we already told you, not invited, not on the guest list.”

FOREMAN
: “Randi, you’re saying that these people were not supposed to be there, not cleared, not invited. Yet, they attended the White House state dinner. That’s—that’s what they did? There’s no question about this?”

KAYE
: “No question about it.”

The fact was there were lots of outstanding questions at the time of this broadcast and sound journalism would dictate caution in a quickly developing story, especially in its early stages.

The
Washington Post
’s Roxanne Roberts and Frances Townsend stuck around and also appeared during this CNN broadcast repeating what they had said to Campbell Brown.

The information kept coming out in dribs and drabs, and no single media outlet was able to put all the information together into one coherent story. It was the fault of the Secret Service—not the hapless couple who had simply shown up to go to a party—and the agency was admitting as much. In addition, Frances Townsend had provided a major piece to the puzzle when she told the CNN audience that night that the agency’s failure was likely compounded when the new Social Secretary’s office neglected to have a staffer checking I.D. at the gate.

These were late breaking details that producers simply could not keep up with, or could not be bothered to check. No matter the facts or clues to the mystery, it was much easier and much more sensational to go with the “White House Party Crashers” theme. The idea resonated like a church bell: beautiful blonde in a red and gold sari breezing past some of the most dedicated and deadly personal guards on the planet. It happened inside of the most protected residence in the country. Townsend fueled the idea when she said on CNN, “Let’s remember, this is a felony. If you lie to a federal official, either the Secret Service or to the social secretary, if they lied their way to get in—
and it seems they would have had to have done that (
emphasis added) … that’s a federal felony.”