Weldon Blamegate Update

Since the homes and offices of his daughter and her associates were raided Monday of last week, Curt Weldon has pretty much blamed every single person on the planet for the raid. “It’s politically motivated,” he says, and blah blah blah, etc. He’s involved in a tough re-election battle with Joe Sestak, and it appears he wants to figure out how to make the voters believe there’s some conspiracy against him.

But how to keep track of each new and exciting person responsible for the FBI raid that Weldon manages to pull out of his ass? Yes, a tough task indeed. Which is why I’m going to try to figure it all out here, after the jump.

To get to the bottom of who Curt Weldon finds responsible, we all have to go back to Feb. 20, 2004. (Actual “on this date” from Wikipedia: “During the past month and a half, the total number of hits to NASA’s homepage was 6.5 billion, a record for the agency.”) Let’s begin:

• Feb. 20, 2004: Los Angeles Times reports that Weldon’s daughter Karen got a bunch of lucrative lobbying contracts despite not having what those in the lobbying industry call “experience.” Another partner in Weldon’s daughter’s lobbying firm is Charles Sexton, a buddy of Curt’s and a bigwig in the Delco Republican party. Weldon blames “State Department officials who resented Weldon involving himself in foreign policy,” according to the Delaware County Times. He’d later blame the Los Angeles Times.

(INTERMISSION)

• Friday the 13th, October 2006: McClatchy newspapers — aww, remember when they bought the Inquirer and Daily News very briefly? — released a report saying Weldon traded his influence in Congress in order to get his daughter and his buddy lobbying contracts. Weldon says there is no investigation.

• Oct. 16, 2006: FBI officials raid the homes of Karen Weldon and Charles Sexton, as well as some offices in Philly and (duh) Florida. Weldon tells a reporter for the Penn student paper (of course) that it’s the work of three people: Melanie Sloan, the executive director of CREW, ex-CIA’er Mary McCarthy (who leaked the info about the secret prisons to Dana Priest) and Sandy Berger, national security advisor to Clinton. There are cameo appearances and quasi-they’re-part-of-it-toos by Weldon about none other than Bill Clinton himself, as well as congressman John Conyers and senator Charles Schumer.

• Oct 18., 2006: With no new news about the investigation, Weldon comes up with a new theory. He says retired FBI agent Gregory Auld told him a Sestak worker “was bragging that three weeks ago they knew this was going to come down.” So it’s someone in the FBI who has… connections to Joe Sestak, or something.

• Oct. 19, 2006: The Delaware County Times calls up Greg Auld and he denies the story:

Auld, a retired FBI agent from Drexel Hill, said a man at a local gym - he refers to him as “Grumpy” because he doesn’t know his name - told him Tuesday that another man in a Sestak shirt said three weeks ago that “something big” would happen to Weldon last weekend. Auld then approached the Sestak supporter, who told him, “We kind of sniffed this out.”

“I said, ‘You guys knew about this?’ and he didn’t say anything,” Auld said, adding that it was the other man, “Grumpy,” who said he had heard from the Sestak worker that “something big was going to come down on Weldon.”

“He didn’t say, ‘We knew,’ he just said, ‘We sniffed it out,’” Auld said of his conversation with the latter individual.

When asked about that, Weldon comes up with a new enemy: bureaucracy.

“You all know that bureaucrats don’t change with presidential leadership at the top. You know that, come on,” he said. “Bureaucrats are in office from one administration to another, whether it’s in the CIA, or the DIA or the State Department or the Defense Department or the Justice Department, and this obviously did not start at the top. It obviously came from the bureaucracy.”

“I’m telling you,” he added, “a retired FBI agent whom I have named, came to me and said that a (Sestak) campaign worker told him three weeks ago that this was going to happen. That is what it is.”

Phew. I think that’s all. Let’s put together an exhaustive list:

• State Department officials jealous of Curt Weldon
• The Los Angeles Times
• McClatchy Newspapers
• CREW director Melanie Sloan
• ex-CIA leaker Mary McCarthy
• Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger
• Bill Clinton
• Rep. John Conyers
• Sen. Charles Shumer
• The Joe Sestak campaign
• A dude at the gym in a Joe Sestak shirt
• Bureaucracy
• “What it is.”

Boy. That Curt Weldon, he sure has a lot of “enemies.”