Bogus FEMA 'reporters' promoted despite role in fake press conference Jason Rhyne

Published: Friday November 30, 2007



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Print This Email This Two FEMA public relations staffers who posed as reporters during a staged news conference about the California wildfires last month no longer have their jobs -- but only because the disaster management agency has promoted them to better ones. Despite their participation in the bogus presser, FEMA's former deputy director of public affairs, Cindy Taylor, and another employee, Mike Widomski, are both receiving the promotions they were earlier promised, Washington Post columnist Al Kamen reports. "On Oct. 23, the day of FEMA's now infamous phony news conference, the agency's former external affairs chief, Pat Philbin, announced plans to promote a number of people in the shop as part of an effort to build a 'new FEMA,'" writes Kamen, who originally broke the news about the fake press event. Kamen cites an email from Philbin stating that Taylor was to be tapped to head the organization's Private Sector Office, and Widomski would be bumped up to assume Taylor's former position. "After our item, and an investigation of what Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called 'one of the dumbest and most inappropriate things I've seen since I've been in government,'" Kamen reports, "we're happy to announce that Taylor and Widomski appear to have been disciplined, FEMA-style. They've received the promotions they were in line to get." According to the current External Affairs Weekly report, he says, the two employees are both listed as holding their new jobs -- Taylor as director of the Public Sector Division, and Widomski as deputy director of public affairs. "Heck of a job," Kamen concludes. FEMA had originally instructed its own public relations staff to pose as reporters when no legitimate members of the media arrived in time for a hastily arranged briefing. "We had been getting mobbed with phone calls from reporters, and this was thrown together at the last minute," Widomski told the Post at the time. Philbin, who orchestrated the event, had also been in line for a promotion -- as head of the PR office at the Department of National Intelligence -- but was later denied the job after news of his role in the embarrassing incident broke. Earlier this week, RAW STORY reported on another press conference controversy. In 2006, Julie Myers, the head of the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, took a question from a spokeswoman for that agency who was posing as a reporter. Myers is currently under scrutiny for awarding a prize to a white employee who wore dark makeup and a prison uniform at an ICE Halloween party.



