The Daily Background
| Is that the real White House telephone directory? Maybe.
by Arlen Parsa
As you may have heard, a lot of bloggers are linking to a purported White House telephone directory, encouraging readers to, as Joe Biden suggested, flood the 1600 Pennsylvania Ave with complaints about Libby’s sentence commutation. I have no idea whether the directory is authentic or not, but I’ve seen such things floating around before, and I think that it probably is real– though quite out of date (despite being marked May 18th, 2007).
Note for instance that the directory has a phone number for White House Counsel Harriet Miers, who left in 2005. The White House Counsel is now Fred Fielding. Also an obvious example of its out-datedness is the listing for the President’s Chief of Staff. Andrew Card left that office in the spring of 2006, and Josh Bolton now sits in his old office.
Further, Claude Allen is listed as a domestic policy adviser, however he quit in early 2006, at about the same time he was arrested for shoplifting. Among other inaccuracies, Tim Griffin is still listed as working in the Department of Political Affairs, an office he worked in for only a year.
