| Craig |
Men’s room mistake
Greg Casey, who once served as Sen. Larry Craig’s chief of staff and later held the position of Senate sergeant-at-arms in the mid-1990s, said Wednesday that the Republican senator from Idaho who pleaded guilty to lewd conduct in an airport men’s room earlier this summer is not the same man he knows.
Noting that he has known Craig for 35 years, Casey said, “I have never seen the man do anything inappropriate in my entire life, sexually or otherwise. My heart goes out to him. Despite what happens, he will always be my friend.”
Security Lapses
Casey, who now heads the Business-Industry Political Action Committee, was giving a talk at the invitation of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society on the role of the sergeant-at-arms.
Casey spoke at length about Capitol security and had a bit of news to break.
First, if you see helicopters landing on the Capitol grounds late at night, don’t automatically assume a terrorist attack and head for the hills: Casey said that, most likely, it’s just teams of Capitol Police practicing to extract Senate leaders and remove them to a secure location during an emergency. But that wasn’t always the case: “There was a time when we didn’t practice that,” he said.
Second, Casey admitted to some earlier flaws in the Capitol campus’ security system. After officers Jacob Chestnut and John Gibson were killed by a gunman in 1998 and the security perimeter was extended farther away from the building, a stopgap measure was to place large concrete planters around the Capitol campus as barriers. But they weren’t all that strong, Casey admitted. What most people didn’t know was “if you had backed a Volkswagen into one of those cement planters, they would have gone right over.”
