LYING LOW HASN’T BEEN EASY for Rep. Barbara-Rose Collins of late — and not just because of her splashy Motor City fur-feather’n’leather ensembles, which a former staffer says bear resemblance to “a Christmas tree sitting down.”
Upon last visiting the Detroit congresswoman (THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Oct. 2, 1995), we detailed how offce staffers were made to put on her slippers, fetch her pedicure prongs, read her palms, brew coffee the exact color of her skin, wash dishes as punishment, infiltrate Hill parties to intercept barbecue, etc. — while suffering racial slurs, chastisement for using Collins’s bathroom, constant threats of firing, and various other indignities.
As if categorically storeping the competition for Worst Boss on the Hill weren’t ignominy enough, now she has real problems and is in the running for Most Corrupt Boss as well. Largely thanks to the reporting of Sarah Pekkanen in The Hill, Collins is being probed concurrently by the Federal Election Commission, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the House Ethics Committee for allegations including but not limited to:
*Failing to itemize over $ 14,000 of campaign expenses charged to an American Express Card.
*Using tax dollars to buy stamps for bulk campaign mailings and dubious airline tickets — former staffers told me they’d picked up her mother, maid, and boyfriend from the airport after they flew in under a staffer’s name.
*Offering bogus itemized expenditures that exceed her receipts by thousands of dollars.
*Writing campaign checks to staffers, who then float the cash right back to her.
*Having a staffer cash a check for thousands drawn off a scholarship fund for low4ncome Detroit students, then allegedly funneled into Collins’s purse.
So she might be a crook, you say, but is it fair to call her Capitol Hill’s worst boss? Yes. Consider her Yuletide Massacre last month, when four staffers (including one who was three months pregnant) were fired, after three of them were subjected to lengthy interrogations by deputy chief of staff Royal Hart. According to newspaper accounts and former staffers I spoke with, Hart said Collins ordered him to conduct taped interviews with aides to determine who’d been leaking information to the media.
He specifically mentioned a December account in The Hill of peeved employees’ being told Collins wanted money instead of a Christmas gift. This is consistent with our reporting on regular Christmas and birthday shakedowns, when staffers were bullied by chief of staff Meredith Cooper to pony up ” contributions” to Collins for simple somethings like a Nordic Track and a hand-carved chess set.
Former staffers claim Hart asked the interrogatees, “Are you willing to take a polygraph?” Those who refused “were not reappointed,” in Cooper’s words, though she denies the polygraph incident and every other allegation listed herein. (Cooper, Hart, and Collins failed to respond to numerous interview requests for this story.)
By all accounts, Cooper is responsible for the mass firings. One former staffer said Cooper, who has worked for Collins since 1975, completely controls access to the member to the point of hoarding: “I could go a whole week without seeing Collins even if she was in the offce.”
Collins admitted as much on the stand at last summer’s Office of Fair Employment Practices hearing, which resulted in her having to pay her gay former press secretary Bruce Taylor over $ 20,000 after he was canned by Cooper, who suspected he had AIDS, two days after his partner died.
Struggling to recall many of her staffers’ names or even the name of her own committee while under questioning by a lawyer, Collins was asked, “Do you remember if at the time you had a Barbara-Rose Collins legislative director?. . . . I don’t know,” she said. “I tried not to run the offce, you know, I tried to be the congresswoman.”
Ex-staffer Tony Martin says he once heard Collins say she’d “fire every motherf — ing staffer just to keep” Cooper. And she nearly has. According to staffers, neither Cooper nor Collins is vying for the title of Sharpest Tool in the Shed. Collins once began a meeting with the General Accounting Office by asking what the initials GAO stood for. Cooper, says Bruce Taylor, “didn’t know how a bill becomes a law. . . . One time she asked me, ‘How do you draft legislation?'”
This doesn’t stop the two women from making boasts to the contrary. Collins falsely claimed to be a Mensa member in her 1990 campaign. And Cooper, who four former staffers say claims she went to law school, never actually finished college. After checking with Central Michigan University to corroborate a biography of Cooper published in Roll Call in 1991, according to which Cooper had graduated from the school with a degree in community development, I learned from officials that they had no record of her diploma. When I confronted her with this in a lengthy interview last year, she denied ever saying it, claiming it was an “error on [Roll Call’s] part” and that “it is not unique for the press to concoct anything.”
The author of that Roll Call column, Karen Foerstel, says all her information was gathered from “either talking to the person themself or getting a press release from the office.”
Cooper said, as Collins has often claimed, that her boss is a victim of racism (despite the accounts of numerous black staffers that they were told they’d be fired and replaced with whites). “In the House elevator,” Cooper said, “some of the white members will allow the white women to go first, but they’ll go ahead of Ms. Collins.” “Who?” I asked. “I don’t know their names, but it’s disrespectful.”
Even unemployed, her fired staffers are relieved. “I’m just glad it’s over,” says one. “Some people’s first job is McDonald’s. Mine was working on the Hill. I can only go up from there.”
by Matt Labash
