What Nanny?

I should just send you all over to Josh Marshall, who's been all over this story since it broke. But I shared his skepticism when I heard about Bernard Kerik's removal from consideration for the Department of Homeland Security post. The whole nanny thing just seemed immediately like a recycled excuse; didn't Zoe Baird and Linda Chavez get busted for the same thing? Something didn't seem quite right. And that appeared to be confirmed when all these other allegations came tumbling out of the media: affairs, misuse of public personnel, ties to mob figures, conflicts of interest, etc., etc.

Well, The Times today raises the possibility that the nanny never existed:

The White House has been unwilling to discuss any specifics of the nanny herself, including whether anyone in the administration had asked Mr. Kerik for details about her identity, status or nationality. Answers were not forthcoming from Mr. Kerik's camp, either. "We are not going to discuss the nanny any further," said Christopher Rising, general counsel at Giuliani-Kerik L.L.C., who is acting as a spokesman for Mr. Kerik.

Among the unanswered questions are where she came from, and even whether she was actually working in the country illegally when Mr. Kerik said she served as a housekeeper and nanny for his two small daughters. In a statement last Friday announcing his withdrawal, Mr. Kerik said he had "uncovered information that now leads me to question the immigration status" of someone who worked for him.

There's one woman in the whole article who claims she saw Kerik's children playing with an "olive-skinned" woman, which honestly is descriptive of nothing. Nobody else in the neighborhood, including most of the nannies, knows who this person is, and many were unaware that the family had any help for their children.

"They never came around here with a nanny," said Sophie Borsuk, 55, the longtime landlady and downstairs neighbor of Mrs. Kerik's mother. "I never saw any nanny. This is the first time I heard about a nanny."

Kerik's lawyer is even going back on his statement identifying her nationality as Mexican.

I guess you can't come out and say "I'm removing myself from consideration from the Cabinet because I did business with Sammy the Bull, and I stalked Judith Regan after our affair ended." But this cover story is getting thinner by the day. You'd think they'd actually be able to produce a nanny on which to pin the story. The truth seems to be that it became apparent that, despite Bush's protestations that "this is a good guy," Kerik was involved in a lot of masty things unbecoming a Cabinet official, and everybody went scrambling for a face-saving maneuver. I hope Josh Marshall and others keep going on this story, because if the nanny doesn't exist, the embarrassment will be bigger than Gigli.