FOLLOW THE MONEY: Mike Garrison and Heather Bresch are so much more than “former business associates”

We’ve been so fixated over the past few weeks on what Mike Garrison did for Heather Bresch, that we’ve forgotten about why. And like most other political stories, you only really understand it if you follow the money. You see, I throw up in my mouth a little bit every time I read something that describes Mike Garrison, former lobbyist, and Heather Bresch, COO of Mylan as “former business associates.” Because that doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Mike Garrison was a lobbyist for Mylan.

Mylan was Mike Garrison’s biggest client.

And Heather Bresch was in charge of Mylan’s lobbyists.

To put it simply, Heather Bresch paid Mike Garrison tens, if not HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of dollars as a lobbyist for Mylan.

And it really was HEATHER — from February 2004 to April 2005, she was Vice President of Public and Government Relations, and Director of Government Relations from March 2002 to February 2004. The stories that describe them as “former business associates” are totally leaving out the fact that he was a lobbyist working DIRECTLY FOR HER.

Now just for fun, factor in the tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars Mike Puskar has raised for Joe Manchin, the hundreds of thousands Garrison makes every year in the job Manchin helped him get, and the millions of dollars in benefits Mylan is rumored to be reaping from the change in command at WVU.

This is a money story, just as sure as if Heather Bresch sent Mike Garrison a briefcase full of cash.

Previously on Battlestar Galactica…

All of This Has Happened Before, and All of This Will Happen Again.

Some of Fifth Column’s new readers might not realize that just over a year ago, we were talking about how Mike Garrison claimed to have graduated from the WVU College of Law “with honors,” when in fact, no such distinction exists. The College of Law does not confer Latin honors upon its graduates, period. And last I checked, you can’t just bestow the distinction of “graduated with honors” upon yourself just because it makes you sound more scholarly to the people who didn’t go to law school and don’t know what the hell Moot Court is.

But that’s exactly what Mike Garrison did.

People new to Fifth Column might also get a kick out of learning that, just over a year ago, most of the commenters thought this issue was just a “triviality,” or “hair splitting,” or my personal favorite: “envious whining.”

It doesn’t seem so trivial now, does it? When you consider that Garrison went about manufacturing a degree “out of thin air” for a longtime friend before he was even inaugurated.

Why is Steven Kite Covering for Mike Garrison?

From MetroNews:

Professor Steve Kite says faculty members should consider the independent panel report in the Bresch case as their primary source. Kite says that report doesn’t say Garrison orchestrated things to make sure Bresch received her executive MBA degree retroactively. “I don’t see where you can really find President Garrison particularly culpable on this,” Kite said Monday on MetroNews Talkline. “Yes, it happened under his watch and he has to take responsibility for it happening under his watch.” … Kite says Garrison removed himself from the Bresch situation and now some are criticizing him for not having a more active role in what happened. “There was a conflict of interest there,” Kite said. “He saw it and he wiped his hands of this.”

FIRST — as my previous post, and many of the comments have pointed out — the question of “who told whom to do what” was not addressed by the panel. For whatever reason, they believed that to be beyond their charge. But the panel did conclude that their was “palpable” pressure to award Heather Bresch a degree regardless of the facts. This is why the Faculty Senate should act immediately to form a commission charged with getting to the bottom of this lingering issue. The idea that the panel’s report is somehow the last word on this torrid affair is pure misdirection, and should be treated as such.

SECOND — Talk is cheap. What, if anything, does Mike Garrison plan to do show that he accepts responsibility for this mess other than just saying, over and over again, that he “takes full responsibility?” The report tells us that this whole debacle began with a phone call from Heather Bresch to her old friend, Mike Garrison. And while Garrison himself did not attend the October 15th “decisional meeting,” his general counsel and proxy-in-chief Alex Macia was there,  along with his Chief of Staff, and communications director. To say that this happened under Garrison’s watch is the understatement of the century. Even if there wasn’t direct pressure from Garrison to award the degree — the fact that such a heroically bad decision was made under his watch is grounds enough for dismissal.

THIRD — Mike Garrison must immediately stop abusing West Virginia’s FOIA law and release his cell phone, land line and email records. It is not our fault that his word is no longer convincing to the people of West Virginia. If he truly “saw a conflict of interest” with his old friend Heather Bresch, and if he truly “wiped his hands of this,” the records will no doubt reflect that. Anything more than that initial conversation with Bresch, or worse yet, a sudden flurry of communication between Garrison and the Governor’s office would be damning.

What is Mike Garrison hiding?

Crony Guy

If you do a search for “West Virginia University” on the New York Times website, you get basically get 2 things: a bunch of stories about our former football coach, and this one: University Investigates Whether Governor’s Daughter Earned Degree.

How fucking embarrassing.

The hell with how it was handled — does anyone really think that anything remotely like this would have happened at all if WVU had hired a remotely qualified person to run the place? Someone who didn’t owe a thousand favors to Joe Manchin and Mike Puskar for getting him the job?

I remind everyone that while the story broke in January, the events happened in October. Garrison’s inauguration was September 1. The ink was barely dry on his contract. It’s really fun to think about that while re-reading some of the comments from last year.

At last

Heathergate makes it to the New York Times.

I like how they mentioned Spike and Don Blankenship in the same piece.

I Can Has MBA?

Ladies and Gentelmen — welcome to President Mike Garrison’s West Virginia University.

If Friday’s story from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is to be believed, Heather Bresch — Joe Manchin’s daughter, and childhood friend of WVU President Mike Garrsion — has been running around for almost 10 years telling people she has an MBA from West Virginia University, when in fact she had completed just over half of the required coursework. The Post-Gazette discovered this by making a routine phone call shortly after Bresch was promoted to Chief Operating Officer of Mylan Pharmaceuticals on October 2. Mylan is WVU’s single greatest financial donor.

But it gets better. On October 22, R. Stephen Sears, the — I’m not kidding here — MILAN PUSKAR DEAN of the WVU College of Business and Economics sent a letter to Admissions and Records ordering them to award the degree to Bresch retroactively. Six classes were added to her record, and grades were awarded for two more classes for which she had received an incomplete. WVU has, and continues to blow it off as a simple clerical mistake. Nothing to see here. Please move along. Also, there is a lovely piece of oceanfront property near Farmington I’d like to sell you.

But hell. To read the AP wire story from the Gazette (there’s a shocker), you’d think it probably was just clerical error.

Except that, other than the fancy new grades and the “degree” that WVU magically awarded Ms. Bresch retroactively, there’s absolutely no evidence that she completed the 22 hours left in her coursework. And here’s the kicker: there’s no record of her ever being in any of those classes AT ALL:

“Ms. Bresch’s name does not appear on the class rosters for five of the six classes that were added to her records, according to sources who viewed the documents. There is no class list for the sixth class because it was an independent study course. Her absence from the rosters indicates she was not registered for any courses after the spring of 1998, the point at which university records had shown she had stopped taking classes.”

There’s no record of Ms. Bresch paying for any of the classes missing from her record, either.

But whatever. Bresch offered as evidence that she attended the December graduation ceremony. Which of course, says nothing as to whether a person actually graduated. And there’s this chestnut:

“Among the more than two dozen members of the December 1998 Executive MBA graduating class reached by the Post-Gazette, including many who would have been in Ms. Bresch’s “cohort” of classes, no one could vouch for her being at the ceremony…One of those students, whose name appears on the class rosters for five of the six classes added to Ms. Bresch’s record, was certain Ms. Bresch did not complete the MBA program. He said he followed her progress because her father was well known — at the time Mr. Manchin was a state senator who had just lost his initial bid for governor.”

Look. You’re just going to have to read the entire article. Nearly 3 months in the making, it makes a rock solid case that Heather Bresch is flat out lying about having earned her MBA degree from WVU. What’s funny is that all of this could be put to bed if Bresch would simply fax a copy of her transcript — or even her grades from one of those semesters (I still have mine!) to the Post-Gazette. Which she of course, refuses to do.

Most embarrassing of all though is the implication that people at the highest level of WVU’s administration orchestrated the rewriting of Bresch’s records. It’s a big fucking deal. She should have had to earn her worthless degree, just like the rest of us.

And let me say, that to those of us who have followed the storied career of Mike Garrison, this just stinks of his handy work. After all, he’s the one who graduated from the College of Law “with honors.”

Notes on a Scandal, Part III: Why This Matters

If I were a journalist or a scholar who studies higher education (as boy-Chancellor and former Goodwin roommate Brian Noland claims to be), I’d write a piece on this, and make a couple points. First:

This is probably the first time that a high-profile university presidency has been converted into a political patronage job. This is the second consecutive hiring of WVU’s president based on politics instead of merit. Hardesty’s and Garrison’s partisans claim otherwise, of course, but everyone in the national higher-education community and in the state’s political circles knows the truth of the matter. So, the next time WVU is looking for a president, everyone will simply assume that Garrison’s successor will also be a political pick — and that assumption will likely be self-fulfilling.

Oh, come on HK, why is this such a big deal? Well, this phenomenon is worth writing about because it’s fundamentally different from the way the rest of the world selects its academic leaders. Most of the time, major schools look for people who have already established themselves at the top of higher ed. Occasionally, they depart from that model and choose people who have superstar records of leadership and achievement in other areas. But to my knowledge, no significant university has ever made such a plain declaration that its presidency is just one more political plum.

In other words, WVU’s presidency has moved out of the category of positions that includes, say, the presidency of Pitt or Rutgers, and into the “Commissioner” class of jobs — e.g., Commissioner of Highways, Commissioner of Racing, Public Service Commissioner (no offense to the fine, politically connected people who currently hold those titles). That’s unprecedented. We’re now the only state in the country that routinely fills its top university presidency just like any other state government job.

What are the consequences of that shift? Well, for one, we’re going to have a hard time from now on getting good candidates to apply for WVU’s top job. No hot prospect on the national college-president market is going to damage his reputation by playing punching-bag for the next David Hardesty or Mike Garrison.

And next time around, potential candidates will know that’s exactly what they’d be doing.

Notes on a Scandal, Part II: See No Evil

This really bears repeating: so much for investigative reporting. Or reporting at all. The Gazette really let us down.

Since Ned Chilton’s day, the Gazette has been the one voice in the state that could be counted on to speak truth to power. I guess it was too much to expect that noble tradition to continue when a Chilton is in on the scam. Betty just wasn’t going to have the integrity of a board she sits on questioned in her own paper — even if that board was enabling a scam the likes of which West Virginia hasn’t seen since the Arch Moore days.

All you crooked political operators take note: If you want foolproof insurance against a Gazette expose, just put Betty on your board. That was the hope when she was appointed, and it worked to perfection.

Notes on a Scandal, Part I

To no one’s surprise (not even the commenters who feigned shock when I said the search was rigged), Mike Garrison’s coronation last month went off with barely a hitch. I say “barely” because there was that three-hour secret session before the Board voted publicly. I don’t think that was part of the plan. The emergency HEPC meeting (scheduled so the Commission could rubber-stamp the Garrison selection before anyone could raise a fuss with them) was set for 11:00, and the Board ended up not voting until around 12:30. I imagine we’ll never find out what took so long.

Who came up with the euphemism “executive session” as a polite term for “secret meeting”?

The so-called “vote” played out exactly like the rest of the search: The real decision was made in complete secrecy. But because Steve Goodwin came out in public to tell us what he’d decided, we were supposed to marvel at how open and transparent the process was. Well glory.

If you watched the live webcast of the Board meeting, you saw how perfect the imagery was. The session started off in a big meeting room with cameras and lots of spectator seats and a pretty board table at the front. But when it came time to actually make the decision, the Board got up and went into the back room. Literally. Behind the board table was a door, and behind the door was the back room. And it was in that back room where the Board went to spend three hours preparing for a five-minute public session and a 16-1 vote. So when we people who aren’t afraid to call a spade a fucking shovel say this thing was all back-room politics, we’re right in more ways than one.

Say it with me:

Picking a president in secret is no way to run a taxpayer-funded university.

Picking a president in secret is no way to run a taxpayer-funded university.

Picking a president in secret is no way to run a taxpayer-funded university.

Especially a university that, according to Garrison, is going to be a lot more taxpayer-funded in the near future.

Stay Tuned, Sports Fans

There’s much more on Mike Garrison’s ascension to the presidency of WVU on the way, so keep dropping by. And before anyone tells me to lay off since it’s a done deal, man, I remind you that it’s been a done deal for years. No reason to stop now.

For the moment, I’d like to throw out what might have been the most descriptive quote from anyone on the total sham of a search process, which came from none other than Dr. Doug McKinney:

“They made their selection before David Hardesty even announced his retirement.“

Good to see someone gets it. I have my own theory as to why West Virginia Republicans haven’t been screaming bloody frickin’ murder over all this. What’s yours?