I simply have to post again.  It’s too good of a damage control story to let it pass me by– Jane Harmon is on an all-out media blitz to get her side of the story out following the New York Times reporting on the CQ scoop about NSA wiretapping her allegedly trying to cut a deal to be made chair of the House Select Committee on Intelligence.  You will have to read the papers tomorrow to get all the facts.  But here’s her challenge: 1)  She is absolutely doing the right thing getting out there as forcefully and personally as she can in the face of the media storm.  Otherwise, she would be letting her adversaries eviscerate her.  That’s Damage Control 101. 2)  Unfortunately, she can’t really refute what the NSA transcripts say, because she doesn’t have them.   That makes Damage Control 101 very difficult. 3)  Therefore, she has to take a weaselly non-denial-denial position, ducking the real questions because she can’t take the chance of being proven wrong when the transcripts do leak out.  Not a great situation for her, but it’s the best she can do. 4)  She is also right to demand that she be given the complete transcripts so she can fashion her defense– although it will... 

Now we know.  There has been lots of consternation and guessing about why President Obama chose Leon Panetta to be CIA Director over Congresswoman Jane Harmon.  Panetta had slipped from sight, leaving Washington years ago for his home in California, and had no apparent connections to the intelligence community. Harmon, on the other hand, would have been the first woman CIA Director, and has extensive experience as a longtime member of the House Intelligence Committee, as well as chair of the Committee. I think the answer is in today’s New York Times, in an article reporting the that NSA had picked her up in secret wiretaps offering to intervene in the case of the two pro-Israel lobbyists under indictment for espionage.  That information alone would have been enough to kill her confirmation as CIA Director, and would have been known to anyone vetting her for that post. Just as interesting, at least to me, is that while the New York Times plays the story big today (right-hand column, top of the front-page) the story was first broken on Sunday by Congressional Quarterly on its web page.  CQ isn’t know for breaking big stories, and when the Times (not to mention the Washington Post) gets beat on national security stories,... 

This is why you need to leave damage control to the experts.  Time Magazine has an article in its current edition discussing the Domino’s flap over a couple of employees who did some disgusting things with cheese (and may or may not have added that to a customer’s pizza) and video-taped the escapade.  When that was uploaded onto Youtube, Domino’s had a serious communications crisis on its hands, and its executives took steps to mitigate the damage (an apology, some Wikipedia updating, etc.).  Fair enough– these things happen, especially when you have hundreds of franchises with thousands of employees.  Dominos has a rigorous training program, but sometimes creepy employees fall through the cracks.  I used to have Advance Auto Parts as a client and handled all of their crises– with 2500 stores around the country, you can bet there were issues to deal with every week.  This was hardly a bad reflection on Advance Auto Parts– to the contrary, it is a great company that takes these responsibilities very seriously.  But back to Time Magazine and Dominos. Time critiques how Dominos handled the crisis, and offers its own suggestions for how it might have done better with its reputation management.... 

Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to drop all charges against former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens once again reinforces why I could never be a fair and impartial member of a jury on a criminal case.  How can you ever trust prosecutors and cops when hardly a day goes by that there isn’t a major story about corruption, perjury, and every other form of dishonesty on the part of criminal justice system?  The New York Times called it a “stunning development” that the Justice Department had discovered yet another case of prosecutorial misconduct on the Stevens case– Stunning to who?   I understand that this may seem a bit unfair.  The overwhelming majority of prosecutors whom I have met and worked with are nothing but upstanding and honest.  But in my mind, that’s why all of the good ones need to welcome outside scrutiny, to identify and weed out their problem children. The fact is that there has never been effective oversight of prosecutors, at least at the Federal level.  There may be a simple reason for it– no one wants to take them on.  When I was working as an investigator on the House Criminal Justice subcommittee 20 years ago, I proposed to the young chairman from New York (now... 

For those of you who noticed the stock markets’ seven percent climb yesterday, thanks are due in no small part to the Obama team’s roll-out strategy, which was a nice relief from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s announcement-with-no-details weeks earlier– that rightfully got panned.  Here is my colleague and budget expert Stan Collender’s take on the media strategy: Just a couple of quick thoughts:  Today’s 497 point rally in the Dow was more than the 479 point drop when Geithner announced the general outline a month or so ago. The very positive (almost 7%) Dow response was the first major test for the plan.  If the markets had reacted negatively this would have been declared DOA. The next 24 hours will be critical for the plan.  Look to see if Asian and European markets rally tonight and tomorrow, and if there’s a second-day rally in the U.S. Congress will need to approve the funds for the plan from the second tranche of TARP funds.  This makes continued support from Wall Street critical.  If markets are rallying because of the plan, Congress will have a very difficult time voting against it because of the virtually certain immediate damage that would do to stock prices. The...