The Era Of Political Staff Covering Up For Impaired Bosses Might Be Coming To An End

This month’s blockbuster New York magazine piece on Sen. John Fetterman’s mental health challenges raised eyebrows for a lot of reasons. But one little-noticed aspect jumped out at Beltway veterans: Fetterman’s former chief of staff Adam Jentleson had actually gone on the record with damning allegations — denied by Fetterman — that the Pennsylvania Democrat was a diminished, troubled figure who had gone off his medications.

Whatever you think of Jentleson’s decision to go public, it was a shocking break with the “staffer code” that has long ruled Washington underlings’ behavior. Instead of keeping mum, Jentleson shared a close-up view of his boss’ erratic moods and risky behaviors, as well as contemporaneous correspondence where the chief of staff outlined his worries to Fetterman’s medical team.

And in a month of newsy stories about how senior aides handled President Joe Biden’s health and acuity, the breach of confidence may be a sign of things to come on both ends of Pennsylvania Ave.

Up to now, particularly on Capitol Hill, blabbing about the boss’ health was just not done. The traditional omerta has always been especially strong when it comes to spilling the beans about lawmakers’ backstage selves. The recent cognitive struggles of late Sen. Dianne Feinstein and former Rep. Kay Granger were largely kept quiet by aides. In the latter case, the silence continued despite the fact that the congresswoman was residing in an assisted-living facility.

Even in the executive branch, where staffs are bigger and tongues are looser, the much more typical pattern is for the lesser-known staff to talk anonymously — and for the reporting to focus on the principals, not the aides. Call it pusillanimous, but this way of doing business is surely better for a staffer’s onward career, always a key concern in Washington. No one wants to hire someone who has been quite so public in their disloyalty.

“Your whole job as a chief of staff is, you’re there to protect,” said John Lawrence, who played the role in then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. “There’s a measure of responsibility in accepting and playing that kind of a staff role that presumes that you are not going to use the intimacy of your relationship with your boss.”

Could that now be changing? In the aftermath of Biden’s disastrous decision to run again, it sure looks like the incentive structure for keeping mum has shifted, even if there aren’t yet many examples yet of insiders following Jentleson’s lead.

Consider the advance reports about the buzziest political book of the season: Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin, which details a supposed cover-up around Biden’s cognitive decline. While the book isn’t out until next week, the authors say that they don’t simply build a case against the former president. Instead, they promise to tell on an inner circle of aides and allies who worked to keep Biden’s alleged condition away from the general public.

The launch follows other scooplets on the same theme in campaign books by authors such as Chris Whipple as well as Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, with more to come in a forthcoming book by journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf. In all of the reporting, the Biden-health passages leave readers with a resonant twist on a famous political question: What did the staff know, and when did they know it?

Given Democratic fury about Donald Trump’s return to the White House, it’s a good bet those aides are in for a world of scorn as they get identified. A New Yorker excerpt from Tapper and Thompson’s book, for instance, details longtime aide Steve Ricchetti’s efforts to squelch George Clooney’s first-person account of Biden’s diminishment, likening Ricchetti to “a Mob boss.” That’s the sort of descriptor that doesn’t usually land on staffers, no matter how badly their president screws up.

When blame for a political disaster is assigned to aides who kept a secret, and those aides are set up for a public pillorying, it creates a hell of a motivation to speak out early.

Little of the Biden-coverup reporting so far is a departure from the dishy-Beltway-scoop pattern of relying on anonymous sources. Many White House details are attributed to a “senior aide,” a “prominent Democratic strategist,” and the like. It doesn’t matter. With the Biden debacle looming large, the next cadre of insiders is likely to think differently when it comes to being quiet about the boss’s state of mind and body — the kind of thing Washington staffers have long taken care of, even if it’s never been part of the official job description.

This is, I think, great news.

In our era of gerontocracy, Washington has repeatedly been flummoxed by how to handle the question of whether a public official is all there. It’s an issue that seems to overwhelm the professional codes of all kinds of Beltway institutions.

Take the media, for instance. Our reporting standards for scandals are built on verifiable things: A copy of the corrupt contract, evidence of the unethical quid pro quo. But when the story is mental decline, the evidence is always going to be foggier. Humans have good days and bad days; documentation is hidden behind HIPPA laws. As a result, reporters who have no problem asking whether a pol is a crook can find themselves tongue-tied when pressing an official about whether he’s lost his marbles.

There’s a broad sense that the press corps dropped the ball on Biden, whose not-so-secret decline was captured in anecdotes bouncing around Washington for a couple years. Ultimately, we’re still waiting for an accepted set of rules on how to proceed.

In the same vein, maybe it’s time for a new code of honor about what kind of discretion aides should show. It’s reasonable to expect them to respect confidences about legislative strategy, internal policy debates, the twists and turns of negotiations. But evidence of dangerous mental health issues or actual dementia seems like a different category. Whoever kept silent about Feinstein’s or Granger’s incapacities engaged in loyal service to their lawmaker — and a pretty shabby dereliction of duty to the citizens of Texas, California and the United States.

To be sure, there’s a lot that’s unique about the story of Jentleson speaking out about Fetterman. The author of a well-received book on the Senate, Jentleson has a higher profile than your ordinary staffer. And as a Democrat in disfavor with the left, Fetterman makes a less risky friendly-fire target than a party-line pol. When I reached out, Jentleson declined to comment about his thought process for going public. Unlike a lot of other former top aides, he hasn’t swung to another senator or hung out a shingle on K Street, which leaves him less exposed to payback from the political class.

Still, it’s good that Jentleson spoke out. And I hope that one side-effect of Biden’s debacle is a new sense that it’s really not okay to hide the news about this kind of thing. “A lot of people in the immediate circle cared more about him than the larger stakes,” Thompson told me this week. “They thought they were the same thing.”

If nothing else, maybe the burgeoning Democratic fury around the Biden situation will change the one calculation that may matter most for Beltway careerists: What will help me climb to the next rung on the professional ladder? Sure, no future boss wants to hire a fink. But being accused of perpetuating a disastrous staff cover-up isn’t a great look, either.