Ken Silverstein
October 4, 2007

Turns out there’s more on those supposedly neutral public servants in charge of the Pentagon’s blogger outreach program that I’ve been discussing over the last few months. The Washington Post reported yesterday that the newest addition to the Pentagon’s outreach team is Michael Allan Leach.

And who is Leach? The Post cites a St. Petersburg Times story which “reported that Leach blamed President Clinton and media liberals for a decline in morals, and wrote in a 1998 Internet posting: ‘I can no longer sit idly by while liberals in Washington with seven brain cells drag this country into the muck and mire of stupidity’.” The same story described him as playing as big a role as anyone in George W. Bush’s victory in Florida in 2000.

Leach’s role was spelled out in a New York Times story that year. Leach, it said, “took his laptop computer to the Seminole County elections offices this fall and added missing identification numbers to roughly 2,000 absentee-ballot applications from Republican voters” so they could be counted for Bush. The Times cited a Florida statute, designed to crack down on absentee-ballot fraud, which said that “only voters, their relatives or their guardians may “request” absentee ballots, and goes on to list all the information, including the voter registration number, that ‘the person making the request must disclose’.”

It takes less than seven brain cells to figure out what participation by Leach means in regard to the objectives of the Pentagon’s blogger outreach effort.

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/10/hbc-900...

This hack's career closely tracks with a number of this administration's disasters. Details, from Kamen in the Post:

...So, after the election, Leach spent six years as a political appointee as special assistant to the administrator of the Agriculture Department's rural development office, minus time out to handle press duties for the CPA in Iraq. He also picked up a master's degree in international affairs from Georgetown and worked most recently in public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...