Crashing a party that you are not invited to takes guts. Crashing Obama’s first state dinner takes more than nerve. Before you decide to imitate Michaele and Tareq Salahi and crash the next state dinner, wait and see what happens to the couple. DOUGLASS K. DANIEL, Associated Press Writer, reports:

WASHINGTON - Crashing a state dinner at the White House apparently takes a security breakdown as well as some kind of nerve. The Secret Service is looking into its own security procedures after determining that a Virginia couple, Michaele and Tareq Salahi, managed to slip into Tuesday night’s state dinner at the White House even though they were not on the guest list, agency spokesman Ed Donovan said.

President Barack Obama was never in any danger because the party crashers went through the same security screening for weapons as the 300-plus people actually invited to the dinner honoring Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Donovan said.

Donovan confirmed the identities of the couple. The Washington Post, which first reported on their evening out, said the Salahis were well-known in the Virginia horse-country set.
The Secret Service learned about the security breach Wednesday after a media inquiry prompted by the Salahis’ online boasts about having attended the private event, Donovan said.
One of the many photos from the dinner posted on Michaele Salahi’s Facebook page shows the couple with a smiling Vice President Joe Biden. In other photos, they appear alone or together with White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty, CBS News anchor Katie Couric, Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., and three Marines in their dress blues.
Donovan would not comment on whether the couple had been contacted by the Secret Service, how long they were on the White House grounds or other details of the investigation.
The Post said uninvited guests who got in could face a potential trespassing charge unless someone from inside the White House staff slipped them in.
Donovan would not comment on possible legal violations.
The agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility was reviewing what occurred. An initial finding indicated that a checkpoint did not follow proper procedures to ensure the two were on the guest list, Donovan said.
“It’s important to note that they went through all the security screenings—the magnetometer screening—just like all the other guests did,” Donovan said. And, he added, Obama and others under Secret Service protection had their usual security details with them at the dinner.

Update November 27, 2009

rashers probe may become criminal investigation

By LARRY MARGASAK, Associated Press Writer
7 mins ago

WASHINGTON - The Secret Service may begin a criminal investigation against the Virginia couple who crashed a high-profile White House dinner, an agency spokesman said Friday.
Jim Mackin said the possible turn toward criminal charges is one reason the Secret Service has kept mum about what happened when Michaele and Tareq Salahi arrived at the security checkpoint Tuesday. They were not on the guest list for the dinner honoring Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Nobody disputes that the two, candidates for a reality TV show, were allowed through security. The Secret Service acknowledges that its procedures weren’t followed.
Still unknown is the story that the uninvited guests spun to the security officers that persuaded them to allow the couple through. That likely would play a role in any criminal charges.
“As this moves closer to a criminal investigation there’s less that we can say,” Mackin said. “I don’t want to jeopardize what could be a criminal investigation. We’re not leaving any option off the table at this point.”
It was not immediately clear what charges would be pursued. The Salahis lawyer, Paul Gardner, posted a comment on their Facebook page saying, “My clients were cleared by the White House, to be there.”
He said more information would be forthcoming.
Attempts to reach Gardner on Friday were not immediately successful.
Michaele Salahi’s hairdresser at the Georgetown salon where she scheduled a last-minute appointment hours before the dinner said she asked to look at the invitation to the White House event, but never saw it.
“She was so excited. She told me that she got it in the mail and it was just an amazing feeling and they couldn’t wait and in fact they called the White House, I believe, to make sure that she was going to be dressed appropriately,” Peggy Ioakim told CBS’ “The Early Show” on Friday. Salahi wore a red sari to the dinner.
Bravo Media, meanwhile, confirmed that on the day of the dinner Michaele Salahi was being filmed around Washington and while she prepared for the dinner by a film crew connected with the network’s reality show, “The Real Housewives of D.C.,” because she is being considered for the upcoming TV program.

“Half Yard’s cameras were not inside the White House. They filmed the couple preparing for the event,” Johanna Fuentes, Bravo Media’s vice president, communications, said in an e-mail late Thursday. She said the Salahis “informed Half Yard that they were invited (to the dinner), the producers had no reason to believe otherwise.”
Fuentes referred further questions to the Virginia couple’s lawyer and their publicist.
The White House refused comment on the Salahis and referred all calls to the Secret Service.
Ronald Kessler, author of a book on the Secret Service, said, “While the couple did pass through a magnetometer to detect weapons, they could have assassinated the president or vice president using other means—anthrax, for example.” He added the Secret Service would not detect secreted biological weapons.
Kessler, a journalist, wrote “In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect.”
The author added that it’s unlikely the Secret Service performed the usual background check to ensure that the crashers were not possible threats.
“The party crashers could have had outstanding arrest warrants for murder. They could have been involved with terrorists. They could have been agents of Iran or North Korea. The Secret Service would never have known,” he said.
During President George W. Bush’s administration, it was standard procedure to have someone from the White House social office at the gate for state dinners and other events with large groups of visitors, according to a former senior Bush aide who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to be seen as criticizing the Obama White House.
The social office is most knowledgeable about the guest list and could have been called in case of any uncertainty, this official said.
White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers, asked by The Associated Press on Thursday whether personnel from her office were at the checkpoint said, “We were not.”

Update November 28, 2009
Uninvited Pair Met Obama; Secret Service Offers Apology

By HELENE COOPER and BRIAN STELTER (NY Times)
WASHINGTON—President Obama and his wife, Michelle, had a face-to-face encounter with the couple who sneaked into a state dinner at the White House this week, White House officials acknowledged on Friday. The revelation underscored the seriousness of the security breach and prompted an abject apology from the Secret Service.

A White House spokesman said that the couple, Michaele and Tareq Salahi of Virginia, met and shook hands with the president and the first lady in the receiving line in the Blue Room, as the Obamas greeted each of their 400 invited guests Tuesday night before moving to a tent on the South Lawn for dinner.

That disclosure coincided with a statement from the director of the Secret Service, Mark Sullivan, saying that his agency was “deeply concerned and embarrassed” by the events. Secret Service officials said the agency wanted to interview everyone connected with the episode, including the Salahis, and had not ruled out criminal charges.

“The preliminary findings of our internal investigation have determined established protocols were not followed at an initial checkpoint, verifying that two individuals were on the guest list,” Mr. Sullivan said.

“Although these individuals went through magnetometers and other levels of screening, they should have been prohibited from entering the event entirely,” Mr. Sullivan said. “That failing is ours.”

On Friday night, the White House released a photograph of the couple in the receiving line, being greeted by Mr. Obama. In the photo, a smiling Mrs. Salahi, wearing a red and gold sari, is clasping Mr. Obama’s hand with both of hers, as her husband looks on. The prime minister of India, Manmohan Singh, is standing next to Mr. Obama.

Mrs. Salahi’s Facebook page has photographs of the couple with officials including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. It is not known who took the pictures.

The couple’s lawyer, Paul W. Gardner of Baltimore, asserts that the Salahis had been “cleared, by the White House,” to be at the event, and so were not really “crashing.” Mr. Gardner declined a request to elaborate on his assertion.

But a Secret Service spokesman, James Mackin, said he had no idea how Mr. Gardner could make such a claim.

For their part, White House officials took pains to publicly refrain from criticizing the Secret Service.

“The men and women of the Secret Service put their lives on the line every day to protect us; they are heroes, and they have the full confidence of the president of United States,” said Nick Shapiro, a White House spokesman. “The White House asked the United States Secret Service to do a full review, and they are doing that. The United States Secret Service said they made a mistake, and they are taking action to identify exactly what happened, and they will take the appropriate measures pending the results of their investigation.”

Domestic security experts said that the episode raised serious questions about protection for the president. Ronald Kessler, author of “In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes With Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect,” said threats against the president had increased 400 percent since Mr. Obama took office.

On Friday, agents went to a Virginia winery founded by Mr. Salahi’s father in search of the couple, one administration official said. A phone call to the establishment, Oasis Winery in Hume, Va., was not returned. The winery’s ownership has been the subject of extensive litigation involving disputes within the family. The Salahis and the winery were saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of unpaid bills, according to bankruptcy and legal findings in Virginia.

Mr. and Mrs. Salahi, who are known in the area to have a taste for polo and fine wine, are aspiring reality-show celebrities. For months, the couple have been trailed by camera crews with the cable channel Bravo, as it prepared for a new show, “The Real Housewives of D.C.”

Seemingly distancing itself from the Salahis’ actions, Bravo said Friday that it would not comment about “ongoing investigations.” Earlier, the channel said that while its cameras were filming the Salahis before the dinner, producers were told by the couple that they had been invited to it.

The Salahis have not officially been selected for the “Houswives” show.

“The decision as to who will be included in the series will not be made for several months,” Bravo said Friday.

By the sometimes twisted logic of reality TV, it is hard to tell whether the publicity surrounding the state dinner would help or hinder the couple’s goals.

For the breakout stars of the multicity “Housewives” franchise, reality television is a full-time—and lucrative—job. Between per-episode fees, endorsements and public appearances, “Housewives” cast members can net six-figure salaries, said a producer with knowledge of the franchise.

In a brutal economy, fortune is an even bigger motivator than fame for many aspiring reality television contestants, producers and researchers say.

Financial hardships were clearly a factor for the Heene family of Fort Collins, Colo., who gained nationwide attention last month when they claimed that their child had floated away on a homemade flying saucer. According to a police affidavit, the Heenes were working with a production company to pitch a television series to networks at the time. The parents pleaded guilty in the case this month.

Both reality television and the Internet have trained people “to brand themselves, to distribute themselves, to get themselves out there,” said James Hay, a communications professor at the University of Illinois and a co-author of the book “Better Living Through Reality TV.”

November 29, 2009

White House Intruders Want Money for Tale
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and BRIAN STELTER (NY Times)
WASHINGTON—As White House officials fended off new questions about how a fame-seeking couple finessed their way into the president’s glittering state dinner last week, the aspiring reality-TV stars themselves began trying to sell their story for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Television industry executives said on Saturday that Michaele and Tareq Salahi had postponed plans for an interview Monday on CNN’s “Larry King Live” and were seeking top-dollar bids for their first television interview.
The Salahis, who embarrassed the Secret Service by passing through its security screens as if invisible and then posed for the cameras with President Obama and many of his bona fide guests at a party honoring India’s prime minister, remained out of sight on Saturday and their spokeswoman did not return calls. The Secret Service would not comment or say whether investigators have interviewed the pair.
For years, the Salahis have publicized their own flashy adventures in the social and sporting scenes of Washington and its outlying horse country, and left behind a record of lawsuits and unpaid bills, many from the bankruptcy of the family vineyard after extended litigation between Mr. Salahi and his parents.
Even the upscale salon where Mrs. Salahi, with TV cameras in tow, was prepared for the big event had never been paid for its previous services in 2002, when the couple were married, the salon’s operators said in interviews.
As questions continued to swirl about the pair’s most remarkable appearance to date, a television network executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the network does not publicly comment on payments, said the couple’s asking price for an interview was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. “They are asking for best offers from all the networks,” the executive said. Programs quietly pay steep fees for photographs and videos to secure interviews in some cases.
Separately, a CNN spokesman confirmed that the appearance on Mr. King’s talk show was postponed on Friday.
Meanwhile, several invited guests who had entered the White House through the same entrance as the Salahis said the Secret Service’s normal security check-in process, familiar to many of them, had been haphazard.
They said Secret Service guards had not directed the visitors through the guardhouse with its metal detector and X-ray screeners, located just inside the east entrance. Instead, after guards glanced at ID cards in the dark, they waited in a chilly mist outside the East Wing portico. Then they were funneled to a portable metal detector but no X-ray scanner for checking other belongings.
The Salahis were not national celebrities but they assiduously cultivated an image as well-connected Washington socialites.
Michaele Salahi has boasted about her work for high-profile charities and is being considered for a brighter spotlight, as a cast member on Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of D.C.” Mr. Salahi, born in Washington, was chief executive of Oasis Winery, a now-bankrupt winery in Virginia that his father started in the 1970s. A polo player, Mr. Salahi also founded the America’s Polo Cup, an annual international match that takes place in Washington. The winery gave generously to the Wolf Trap cultural center’s foundation, where he was on the board for a few years. (Traditionally, the first lady is the foundation’s figurehead patron.)
The family put the winery up for sale in 2007, but Mr. Salahi got into a fight over control with his parents, Dirgham and Corinne Salahi. The winery filed for bankruptcy in February.
Still, the Salahis moved through Washington’s social elite with a sense of privilege even though their business had been in bankruptcy and they left some personal bills unpaid.
For her wedding, Mrs. Salahi ran up a tab of thousands of dollars having her hair and makeup done at the Erwin Gomez Salon, an exclusive establishment in Georgetown that says it helped prepare members of the Obama family on Inauguration Day.
But James Packard-Gomez, the salon’s creative director, said in an interview on Saturday that even though Mrs. Salahi had never paid her bill, she continued to book appointments and the salon continued to serve her.
Indeed, the salon spent seven hours preparing Mrs. Salahi for Tuesday’s state dinner as a camera crew from Bravo network’s local production contractor recorded the preparations.
“She’d always call and want to come in, but always expected Erwin to comp her,” Mr. Packard-Gomez said, referring to his business partner at the salon.
Mr. Packard-Gomez said Mrs. Salahi called him just 20 hours before the state dinner to schedule an appointment. Mr. Packard-Gomez dropped everything, he said, even helping Mrs. Salahi arrange her now famous red sari. She mentioned having asked the White House if it was appropriate attire. But when he asked Mrs. Salahi to show him her White House invitation, he was startled that she could not produce it.
“My guests pretty much always show me the invitation when it’s the hottest party in town,” Mr. Packard-Gomez said. “I know a lot of guests that were on the ‘A list’ that were not invited. So why was she?”
The Secret Service, which has said that they should not have been let in, acknowledged that officials at the White House east gate “did not follow proper procedures” to confirm that Mr. and Mrs. Salahi were on the list of invited guests.
On Saturday, neither White House officials nor the Secret Service would comment on why guests had initially been screened in the dark, where it was difficult even to read the names on driver’s licenses, and why guards had not examined their belongings in the way that is common even in less prominent federal office buildings and popular public museums.
Edwin M. Donovan, a spokesman for the Secret Service, said he could not provide additional details about the screening procedures that either were in use or were supposed to be in use at the state dinner on Tuesday night.
But Mr. Donovan said, “The procedures don’t change because of the event taking place.” The Secret Service publicly apologized on Friday for the security breach, and Mr. Donovan said he hoped to provide a fuller explanation about what went wrong “in the next couple of days.”
Janie Lorber contributed reporting.

Update: November 30, 2009
FOREIGNERS: Culture Crash—The Salahis and the long history of social climbing.
By Anne Applebaum in Slate

Social climbing is an ancient art, as old as society itself. The character of the high society imposter—the fake aristocrat, the soi-disant marquis, the “professor” with no degree—has been known in every era. Social climbers and charlatans have been described over and over in fiction. Think of the “king” and the “duke” who swindle Huckleberry Finn, or of Madame Verdurin, who claws her way upward throughout the course of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past—or of the Melanie Griffith character in Working Girl.

Over the centuries, some societies have been more susceptible to these sorts of swindles than others. Catherine the Great’s Russia, for example, was positively swarming with phony English duchesses and Italian princes: Imperial St. Petersburg was aspirational enough at that time to want the company of “real” European aristocrats but far away enough from London or Naples to make it difficult to check their pedigrees. One also thinks of Edith Wharton’s New York, for similar reasons: Her characters are precisely the sort who would fall into a mésalliance with a dodgy Polish aristocrat just off the boat who invariably turns out not to be what he seems.

To that notable group of societies we can now add 21st-century Washington, D.C. Like 18th-century Russia, it is a world of neophytes, a society whose members have only recently “made it” into an elite magic circle and who don’t necessarily know the other members all that well. Like 19th-century New York, it is also a world where appearances matter. You get invited to the party—whether the White House Hanukkah party or the state dinner—not just because of who you are but because of what you represent, which costume you wear, which ethnic group you come from.

Above all, it is a world that seems to offer both wealth and fame to those outsiders who manage to enter it. And it was in pursuit of both that Tareq and Michaele Salahi bamboozled their way into last week’s White House dinner for the Indian prime minister. Just like all charlatans and swindlers over the centuries, they managed it by looking and acting the part. He looks as if he could be of South Asian origin, which seemed right; he also wore black-tie and what looks, in the photographs, like a state decoration or medal. She is a striking, professionally coiffed blonde and wore a sari—an expensive red sari. Having wrangled their way into meetings with Prince Charles and Oprah Winfrey (Michaele even swindled her way into Washington Redskins cheerleader alumni parties), they knew how to behave around the contemporary aristocracy. Simply act as if you belong: Don’t stare too hard at the celebrities, don’t eat or drink too much, and do engage your neighbors in light chitchat about the Kashmir conflict and the Indian GDP. Since hardly anyone knows anyone else at this kind of party, you can get away with it.

But there are differences between the Salahis and, say, Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, a self-described “Spanish aristocrat” who set himself up as a glamorous “faith healer” in 1770s St. Petersburg and made his living by borrowing money from gullible courtiers (and, possibly, by renting out his wife, the “Princess di Santa Croce,” to Prince Potemkin). The Salahis are hoping to cash in faster—a lot faster. It has been less than a week since they crashed the president’s party, and already they are demanding a six-figure sum for the exclusive TV appearance in which they either will declare themselves to be offended, on the grounds that they “thought” they were invited to the White House—or will boast of having pulled off the social-climbing coup of the century.

They also have a lot more help than did the swindlers of yesteryear. Michaele had a TV crew film her preparations for the party at a Georgetown beauty salon, so there is footage ready for whoever has the money to pay. A publicist has been booked and is prepared to negotiate. Plenty of “legitimate” news outlets are ready to play: According to the Washington Post, a CBS reporter has already slipped a note under their door, offering an interview with Katie Couric. Next will come the book contract, the movie rights, and—who knows?—maybe the TV talk show. I can just see it: Famous for Being Famous: At Home With the Salahis.

Unless, of course, they meet the same fate as their many predecessors. Spanish Count Cagliostro was eventually expelled from St. Petersburg after the empress learned that he was neither Spanish nor a count. The king and duke in Huckleberry Finn were tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail. A century ago, the Salahis, too, would be shamed, embarrassed, and finally banished from the elite world that they had contrived to enter. Even now, they ought to expect to be under arrest for lying to the Secret Service, if nothing else—unless the rules of polite society have changed so much that there are no longer any rules at all.

Anne Applebaum is a Washington Post and Slate columnist. Her most recent book is Gulag: A History.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2236924/