Hey, Senator McCain, “Who is Fred Malek?”

By Dean Barker

Meet McCain’s National Finance
Co-Chair Fred Malek.

So, who
is Fred Malek, anyhow?

On a Friday in August 1959, five men in their twenties were arrested about 2 a.m. and held in the county jail all day after sheriff’s deputies found a blood-spattered, unoccupied car about 1:15 a.m. at the entrance to Vicary’s
  Park on Kickapoo Creek Road near Peoria, Ill.

…After checking the blood-spattered pants of one of the men at the state crime laboratory in Springfield, it was determined that the stains were animal and not human blood. Backes said the men then changed their story and said they had "caught a dog and were barbecuing it."

Police then found the skinned animal on a spit in the park. The insides of 
the dog had been removed, and a bottle of liquor was found on a nearby park 
table. Backes said the men told him they had been drinking earlier in the 
evening at a West Bluff tavern.

One of the men arrested in the incident, in which a dog was killed,
  skinned, gutted and barbecued on a spit, was Frederick V. Malek, 22, of
  Berwyn, Ill.

It’s unclear to me whether or not Malek’s earlier fondness for drunken
barbarism influenced at all the carrying out of his prominent
role within the Nixon Administration. 

You make the call:

Malek’s responsiveness program was extensively investigated by the Senate 
Watergate committee. The panel found that the program was aimed at influencing 
decisions concerning government "grants, contracts, loans, subsidies, 
procurement and construction projects," decisions regarding "legal and 
regulatory actions," and even personnel decisions that affected protected 
"career positions" — all to advance Nixon’s reelection.

Wow. I’m thinking Mr. Malek might really feel at home in Bush’s concept of the current Department of Justice.

Read more about Malek…

But that’s not all:

The Post reported that in 1971 Malek had ordered the FBI to conduct an
  investigation of then-veteran CBS correspondent and Nixon critic Daniel
  Schorr.

Small potatoes, though – it’s just that dirty hippie NPR guy who goes on and
on during my Saturday morning trip to the garbage dump.  You know what
really "should be off-limits from the political and partisan
battlefield"?  Witch hunts for Jews.  Yeah, I’m thinking witch
hunting Jews is an even bigger partisan no-no than talking about cancer:

It was also in 1971, The Post reported, that Malek was given a patently
  anti-Semitic order from a paranoid Richard Nixon to count the Jews in
  high-ranking posts in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Instead of
  refusing, Malek set about compiling a list of 13 of 35 top BLS employees who, 
he believed, were Jewish. Less than two months later, two senior BLS officials 
who were Jewish were moved out of their jobs to less visible posts. Malek 
acknowledges carrying out the disgusting hunt for Jews, but he denies having 
anything to do with the transfers.

I could go on about how Malek has gone on to rewarding positions and
connections with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
But that’s "political battlefield" stuff. Instead, let’s take
a look at what Malek’s been up to lately (2004):

The SEC instituted administrative and cease-and-desist proceedings against 
Malek, his company, Thayer Capital Partners, and two Thayer affiliates, TS Equity Partners IV L.L.C, and TC Management Partners IV L.L.C. The SEC charged 
that in 1998 the Connecticut treasurer, Paul J. Silvester, used state pension 
investments in Malek’s company to reward a friend and political supporter, William DiBella, former majority leader of the Connecticut Senate.

The SEC charged that Malek, who was seeking state money for investment in 
one of Thayer’s funds, hired DiBella and paid him a percentage of the state 
pension fund’s total investment with Malek’s company, "even though DiBella had
no prior involvement with the transaction and ultimately performed no
meaningful work related to the investment." DiBella understood from Silvester that he didn’t have to do any work for Malek or his company and that Silvester even increased the amount of the pension fund’s investment with Malek "by at least $25 million (to a total of $75 million) solely to secure a larger fee for DiBella," according to the SEC News Digest.

A side note: Why the usually interesting Marc Ambinder would give this
creature media
oxygen is beyond me.

Update: Look who Malek’s "old partner" is, helping him to
raise some major coin for the Repubs (AP)

President Bush joined an old partner to raise serious campaign cash for
  Senate Republicans.

The president headlined a private fundraiser Tuesday night at the home of 
Fred and Marlene Malek in the wealthy Washington suburb of McLean, Va. The dinner was raising $2 million for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of the Senate GOP.

And look at how Our Liberal Media has sanitized Malek’s past:

Malek, a veteran of the Nixon White House, also advised Presidents Ford and Reagan and was the 1992 campaign manager for the first President Bush.

More: FWIW, Malek "Sets
the Record Straight" on the dog BBQ in his own blog post. Make of it what
you will. Personally, I don’t know how much of an innocent bystander you can be
when you’re drunk and hiding in the woods and connected to a blood splattered
car (according to the news reports from the
incident).