Sunday, May 06, 2007

when scandals collide

everyone has been writing "when scandals collide" posts lately - most recently in relation to Monica Goodling and the DCMadam... now it's my turn...

one thing i've been trying to work out, forever, is how kevin kellems fits into the scheme of things.

Kellems is one of the cronies that Wolfowitz took over to the WorldBank. Kellems was Wolfowitz' spokesman at the Pentagon, then took the same job with Cheney, and then onto the WorldBank with the Wolf.

Prior to that, Kellems had a PR business with a woman called Melissa Dollaghan - as it happens, she worked at the famous Group W - which was Brent Wilkes' 'marketing' company - with repuglican operative Michael Mack and Joel Combs, indicted nephew of Wilkes, who happened to work in the anthrax biz before joining the family operation, which also happened to be in the anthrax biz, officially.

Melissa Dollaghan used to work with Brian Bilbray, and Slade Gordon, and married the local Poway Assemblyman - (the poor Assemblyman guy was shocked, shocked to learn that there were shenanigans involved and promptly returned all the money he'd been given by Wilkes)

Are you confused yet? Forget all that stuff about Wilkes and Dollaghan etc, that was (mostly) just an irrelevant detour. Kevin Kellems worked for Wolfowitz, then Cheney, and then Wolfowitz again at the World Bank.

Wolfowitz was named in Giraldi's "100% right" article about Sibel's case - and I've previously written about how the World Bank report on heroin magically ignored Turkey's role in the whole game. Now, I've just stumbled back across Nur al-Cubicle (which has done a lot of great work in the past) and found this (unsupported):
"The job of Kevin Kellems (at World Bank) is apparently official censor. "
The G.U.T.! Finally. We've got Sibel, Wilkes, World Bank, Cheney, Pentagon, heroin - and everything!

On a somewhat more serious note - I wouldn't be surprised if we could learn a lot by tracking people who moved from the Pentagon to OVP and vice-versa. Eric Edelman, who features strongly in Sibel's case, is one of the most prominent (he was nearly Libby-level within the OVP before being given Grossman's old job as ambassador to Turkey, then he took Feith's old job at Pentagon), and we've got Kellems (OVP, Pentagon, World Bank) - are there any others that we can think of? Laura has had all sorts of trouble getting a list of people who even work in Cheney's office. I wonder why.

(update: Kellems resigns)