Bush's sex police chief arrested

Sidney Blumenthal

Claude Allen was the most prominent African-American on Bush's White House staff. His story is telling of the price exacted of an ambitious African-American in the contemporary Republican Party.

President Bush's chief domestic policy adviser, Claude Allen, had a scheme. He bought electronic goods and clothing at Target, a mass-market department store chiefly located in suburban malls, and loaded them in the trunk of his car. Then he took his receipt, filled up a cart at Target with the exact same items, and brought them to the returns desk for credit. Last Thursday, Allen was arraigned in district court in Maryland on charges of felony theft. Police have documented 25 separate cases in which Allen engaged in his elaborate charade of purchasing products and receiving refunds. Each felony count is punishable by up to 15 years in prison.


President Bush's chief domestic policy adviser, Claude Allen, had a scheme. He bought electronic goods and clothing at Target, a mass-market department store chiefly located in suburban malls, and loaded them in the trunk of his car.

Then he took his receipt, filled up a cart at Target with the exact same items, and brought them to the returns desk for credit. Last Thursday, Allen was arraigned in district court in Maryland on charges of felony theft.

Police have documented 25 separate cases in which Allen engaged in his elaborate charade of purchasing products and receiving refunds. Each felony count is punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

Claude Allen was the most prominent African-American on Bush's White House staff, a rare gem, handled carefully, his resume carved and polished. Up from obscurity, a child from a poor neighborhood of Washington, D.C., he rose to sit at the president's right hand.

When the president nominated him for a federal judgeship on the 4th Circuit Court covering the southeastern states, it seemed he was being groomed even for the Supreme Court. Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, indeed, was one of his mentors.

Democrats, however, blocked his nomination, after Allen unconvincingly explained that when he had said in 1984 that "the queers" supported the Democratic Governor of North Carolina Jim Hunt, he only meant to suggest "odd, out of the ordinary, unusual," nothing at all to do with gays. Still, with his judicial nomination in purgatory, Allen continued
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