video Hard not to think this isn't the long arm of the Salahis at work. News just broke that Desiree Rogers will step down as White House social secretary next month. Rogers, you may recall, got into some hot water back in November after the Salahis "crashed" a state dinner at the White House. (more...)

video White House Party Crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi went somewhere in Washington by invitation yesterday: A meeting of the House Homeland Security Committee as part of a criminal investigation of the incident. Though that "investigation" didn't yield much, as the Salahis took the Fifth Amendment, on the advice of their lawyer, and refused to answer any question. Any question. At all. (more...)

Talk about the party that never ends! Phew. Yesterday the Secret Service confirmed that there had indeed been a third "crasher,' in addition to the Salahis, at last year's White House state dinner. Though calling him a crasher seems a tad unfair since he was apparently brought along by the Indian delegation (the Indian prime minister being the reason for the dinner in the first place), and additionally did not show up with a reality film crew in tow. (more...)

Oof. Welcome to the new decade where apparently we are on our own when it comes to security. Of course you remember, last month when the Salahis created quite the media stir after they slipped the Secret Service "crashed" a White House state dinner. Even at the time there was a serious element to all that overdone, splashy headline coverage, because of course while the Salahis didn't appear terribly threatening we were still talking about the President of the United States. (more...)

It is perhaps a measure of the media cycles of the blogosphere that I consider the latest study from Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism on last week's news coverage to be encouraging. According to the study, 27% of the newshole between Nov. 30 and Dec. 6 was devoted to coverage of Afghanistan. Which makes sense since the President's speech took place on the 2nd. Though it is interesting (and a not a little disturbing) to note that it is "the largest amount of attention the media have devoted to the war there since the PEJ began monitoring the news in January 2007." Meanwhile, coverage of the economic crisis accounted for 15%, which actually seems a bit low if only because at the end of the day doesn't everything come back to the economy? (more...)

"Considering the White House’s hulking, media-rich Web site, its Facebook page, photo galleries and podcasts on iTunes, the presidency seems less threatened by the incursion of a reality show than running an administration that is in danger of becoming one.”

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There were several disappointments at Thursday's Crasher-gate hearing, but chief among them were Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan's continued insistence that the now-famous security breach posed no threat to the President, and the committee's focus on Social Secretary Desiree Rogers' role in said breach.

Taken together with the media's initial narrative on the Social Secretary's Office, the right's targeting of her, and a heated broadside from the White House press corps, it seems some are taking the Secret Service's failure as an opportunity to settle scores with Desiree Rogers.

Initially, I shared the House Committee on Homeland Security's consternation at Rogers' absence from the hearing, but after further consideration, I'm not so sure. The committee members' interest in Rogers seemed to involve spreading some of the blame for the Secret Service's failure to turn away Michaele and Tareq Salahi, as they repeatedly questioned Sullivan as to whether the presence of a Social Office staffer would have prevented the breach. This is absurd on two counts.

First of all, this is the year 2009. You no longer have to actually be standing next to someone in order to communicate with them. The officers at that first checkpoint had an entire world of confirmation at their fingertips. The committee focused on the fact that there usually is a staffer present for state dinners, but they seemed ignorant of the fact that 99.99% of White House visitors are checked in by the Secret Service alone.

More absurd is the notion that the Secret Service needs backup from the White House social staff. If that's true, Sullivan should just hang it up. This would be akin to Batman blaming a defeat on the absence of Alfred, the butler.

Since Rogers' name first came up, however, there seems to have been a cauldron of resentment simmering just below the surface. A disgruntled former staffer came forward to complain about Rogers, and the right jumped at the chance to show how Rogers was yet another example of how Barack Obama is everything that's wrong with the world.

I'm at the House Committee on Homeland Security hearing on Crashergate, where Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan spent the morning on the hot seat for his agency's failure to repel uninvited guests Michaele and Tareq Salahi from last Tuesday's White House state dinner. Among the revelations this morning is the embarrassing fact that, according to Sullivan, the Secret Service learned of the breach on Facebook. (more...)

As a Congressional hearing gets underway to drill down on how the uninvited Salahi couple managed to breach White House security, the White House has removed any and all doubt as to whether the Secret Service might have had a legitimate excuse for letting the couple past the first checkpoint. (more...)

“Given how desperately we want to believe in a human god, it didn't take much peddling from Team Tiger for us to accept Woods as a modern deity...And we ate it up....So now that the "real" Woods has been revealed as a wild bone-daddy who behaves more like your out-of-work, alcoholic brother-in-law than an object of worship, we feel cheated.”

The saga of would-be reality stars and accused White House Party Crashers Michaele and Tareq Salahi continues to unroll slowly, as NBC fortuitously scores scoop after scoop. The latest: The Salahis' attorney provided The Today Show with copies of their emails with Defense Department White House Liaison Michele Jones. If this is the bombshell evidence they promised to bring Matt Lauer in their meager Today interview Monday, they're in trouble. These emails are all smoke, no  gun. Given the very best possible interpretation, the emails show that Michelle Jones was working to get the Salahis tickets to the arrival ceremony prior to the dinner, but explicitly tells them that the dinner has been full up for months. The emails leave open the possibility, however unlikely, that the Salahis might attend the arrival if tickets became available. That leaves open the possibility that the couple passed through the first checkpoint as legitimate attendees of the arrival ceremony. I asked the White House about the arrival ceremony specifically, and a White House official told me that "the Salahi’s were not cleared to enter the White House grounds for any reason." Michele Jones never confirms either event for the couple in the emails, except to accept their thanks the following day. The crux of their defense, then, is that they went to the White House just to check if Jones had managed an 11th-hour miracle, and they say in a thank-you email that they were, indeed, on the list. The email conveniently explains that their cellphone battery had died, so they wouldn't have received any calls telling them not to go. The White House and the Secret Service have now fairly definitively ruled out every scenario that could vindicate the Salahis. While their future as reality TV stars may be bright, it looks like they could face serious trouble for what looks more and more like a ridiculous security breach.

video While there are plenty of jokes to be made about the Salahi's White House state dinner party crashing, it is at the core, an extremely serious breach of White House security that could have endangered the President's life. That is not a joke. Neither is the Congressional hearing that's been called for tomorrow to investigate what happened. Because as audacious at the Salahi's behavior was it pales in comparison to lapse in security that happened. The question now is whose lapse was it? The Secret Service, who has apologized, or somebody in the social office? (more...)

At the heart of the story of Michaele and Tareq Salahi's big adventure at last week's state dinner is a security breach so unbelievable, I actually don't believe it. However, barring the emergence of exculpatory "stunning details" that were absent from this morning's useless "Today Show" interview, the President would do well to heed the alarm being sounded by Rep. Peter King (R-NY) and "In the President's Secret Service" author Ronald Kessler in this clip from yesterday's "Today Show." King calls Obama our "most threatened President ever," and Kessler says "it's only a matter of time before there's an assassination." (more...)

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"This is no smile-and-say-cheese matter. Two rank amateurs breached what is supposed to be unbreachable security. Let there be no doubt about the consequences for the romp: Careers will be ruined. That's reality."

--The San Francisco Chronicle editorial board on the Salahi gate-crashing incident (more...)

The latest development in the saga of the polo-playing, dove-throwing socialites who crashed the first state dinner of the Obama administration is something that we suggested yesterday: Michaele and Tareq Salahi may have had help from the inside. (more...)

As we head into the news hell that is a long holiday weekend, you can be sure to learn more than you ever wanted to know about the White House Party Crashers, Tareq and Michaele Salahi. Of primary concern is how this pair of Chester Cheetah-level socialites managed to brazenly blow their way past the Secret Service and into the White House for the ultra-exclusive State Dinner in the first place. My expert opinion? They didn't.

The Salahis, owners of the Oasis Winery and the America's Cup of Polo, are rumored to be part of Bravo's upcoming "Real Houeswives of DC" reality show. Actually, there are more than rumors. In September, the Salahis were spotted being trailed by a Bravo film crew, and Michaele Salahi's makeup artist reported seeing a TV crew filming them as they prepared to crash the state dinner. Though Bravo declined to make a statement yesterday (even to NBC News, part of its corporate family!), today Bravo reluctantly confirmed that a "Real Housewives" camera crew was ineed with the Salahis as they crashed their way to the most exclusive ticket in town. They've got a flair for the dramatic, as their cheese-tastic wedding video shows.Yes, they're throwing doves. (more...)