Cirque Du Salahi: Be Careful Who You Trust (14 page)

Trying to go out to go grocery shopping the next few days would be out of the question.

By Sunday, November 29
^th
, Michaele was suffering from a bad case of cabin fever. She had spoken to her mother on the telephone, of course, but on this day she wanted to be with her mom. “I just needed to see her, I was feeling so sick and beaten down, I just thought a hug would help so much,” Michael recalled. “It was really stupid of me to go out looking back on it now. I just didn’t understand what was happening to my life.” There were still so many reporters camped outside their home, Michaele called the Warren County, Virginia Sheriff’s Office for help in clearing her driveway and holding the media back so she could leave.

Michaele turned her car toward Interstate 66, the road to Fairfax where Rosemary Holt lived, and for a moment she remembers she felt she could breathe. She used her cell phone to call her friend Jason Hoskinson, from the David Yurman jewelry store, and told him she’d been worrying about not returning the pieces he’d loaned her to wear to the White House.

“I told her I completely understood her situation and she shouldn’t worry about it. We were planning to see each other early the next week anyway.”

Suddenly, Michaele realized she was being closely followed by a car coming up on her side dangerously fast. She told Jason, “There are two men in a car next to me and one is pointing a camera at me! I’m going, like, 70 miles an hour!” She told Jason she had to hang up to call her husband. As Jason was telling her to call the police instead, the line went dead. Tareq answered his phone to hear his wife’s frantic breathless description of what was happening. And then she spotted a second paparazzi car on her tail—maybe even a third one, she wasn’t sure. Tareq firmly instructed her to call 911 immediately and tell them who she was, where she was and what was happening. Still traveling at high speed, hoping to lose those in pursuit, Michaele dialed 911 but as she fumbled with the phone, her wheels caught the side of the shoulder and her white Audi was pulled into the sunken, V-shaped median divider! She held firmly onto the wheel as she careened uncontrollably down the middle of the Interstate, sometimes at such an awkward angle the car nearly flipped over.

“The 911 Operator stayed on the phone with me the whole time and told me what to do. I saw two police cars go after the paparazzi guys and 911 told me to get off at Exit 28.” As she slowly exited, still shaking from the event, Michaele says she saw the two police cars had boxed in the car with the two occupants.

A young officer motioned to her to pull ahead and park and said to her, “Why are you out? It isn’t safe with these guys all over.” She explained her destination and the deputy said they would see she got to her mother’s house safely.

Michaele pulled back onto the road and called ahead to tell Rosemary when she’d arrive. “Missy, you can’t come here,” her mother said in an urgent voice. “They (the media) are all camped out in front of our home. Missy, it isn’t safe here!” Michaele sadly turned the car around and headed home again.

The Secret Service first visited Rosemary Holt in their effort to locate the Salahis the day after Thanksgiving. After Michaele’s mom put them in direct contact with the couple, agents instructed Tareq and Michaele to meet them for an interview at the Café Deluxe at the Tysons Corner Mall. It was an awful location choice since the meeting was set for Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the season. The Salahis’ faces had been splashed nationwide and someone was sure to recognize them. Instead, at the last minute the agents booked a conference room at the Tysons Corner Sheraton Hotel.

In an effort to instill in Paul Gardner what a serious situation they faced, Tareq informed him that they’d been summoned by the Secret Service for an official interview. Tareq was angry that it had progressed this far. He also kept his friend Gregory informed and his analytical antenna went on high alert. Secret Service agents wanting to meet out in the open like that? It sounded strange to Gregory and he called a friend to check to see if the names the agents had given were real names. “I thought maybe it was
TMZ
or some other reporter trying to lure them somewhere to ambush them,” Gregory recalls. “But I was able to find out they were real Secret Service.” Just the same, Gregory went with his friends to the Sheraton Hotel and scoped out the room and the agents ahead of time just to make sure.

It had dawned on the Salahis that they probably should take some sort of legal representation—an independent third party—with them. Gardner was being no help, so Tareq called Ed Pennington, an intellectual property attorney he’d used. “I knew it was a holiday weekend and I knew he and his wife had two small children, but I had nowhere else to turn,” Tareq remembers. “I quickly filled him in and asked if he could go with us. Thankfully, he said yes.”

Ed Pennington said later, “It was fate that I happened to be in the office—alone—working that day and picked up the phone when Tareq called.”

The Salahis were to be interviewed separately, the agents said. Tareq volunteered to go first so Michaele and Gregory took a seat to wait in the open coffee shop area of the hotel. About 30 minutes later, Michaele spotted Paul Gardner sitting at a table nearby. What was he doing there? Gardner’s Baltimore, Maryland office was fifty miles away and they hadn’t expected him to attend.

“He asked me, ‘Where’s Tareq?’ and I said he’s talking to the Secret Service downstairs in a conference room.” Michaele says Gardner, “Jumped up, freaked out and said no, no, no, no, no over and over again. ‘He can’t speak to them! Show me where they are!’” Gregory confirms this account.

Inside the closed door meeting, Attorney Ed Pennington had wisely asked the agents up front, “Do you intend to charge the Salahis with a crime?” The agents said no and explained they were from the Internal Affairs Department and were there to investigate what their own agents might have done wrong. Tareq then asked, “Were you aware that I was communicating with a White House official and had provided our social security numbers, dates of birth and other information
last week
?”

The agents admitted they were not aware of that fact and Tareq remembers them saying, if that was the case “then it appears this could be a big misunderstanding.” With that assurance, Tareq opened up a folder and began showing them copies of his emails with attorney Gardner and Michele Jones. He showed them the business card of Admiral Stephen Rochon, the man who had invited them to come back to the White House that night after showing them the proper exit point.

Upstairs, Michaele was beginning to panic at Gardner’s frenzied insistence that he be taken immediately to the room where the Secret Service was interrogating Tareq. After showing him the way, Michaele reports, Gardner literally burst into the room and said in a forceful voice, “This interview is over!”

Michaele came up behind and said, “Paul, we
want
to talk to these agents. We
want
to get this all explained.” But Gardner, who stands an imposing 6 feet 5 inches tall, wheeled around, locked eyes with her and said sternly, “Michaele,
listen to me…
.”

The interview was over. All parties went silently up the escalator to the main lobby where Tareq said to the agents, “Wait a minute. I want to get this settled.” Right there, in the public hotel lobby, the Salahis challenged Gardner to get Michele Jones on the telephone so everyone could hear her corroborate their version of events. Gardner had Jones on speed dial.

With the Secret Service Agents standing just feet away Gardner, an attorney he’d brought named Mark Dycio, Michaele, Tareq and Ed Pennington gathered around the cell phone speaker to talk to Jones. Once again she blamed the media for getting it all wrong. As she detailed her back and forth communications with the Salahis, she paused at one point to say, “…are you still there?” She was quickly assured that everyone was listening intently.

In a sworn statement submitted to the U.S. Secret Service main investigators Pennington recalled, “Ms. Jones said nothing on the call which gave me the impression that the Salahis had done anything improper or that she was, in any way, distancing herself from her role in this event. She stated, effectively, that this was a big misunderstanding and this was blown way out of proportion.”

Within days the White House would issue a statement carrying Michele Jones name in which she did, indeed, distance herself from the Salahis. It read in part, “I specifically stated that they did not have tickets and in fact that I did not have the authority to authorize attendance, admittance or access to any part of the evening’s activities.” This doesn’t square with the e-mails I saw.

The Salahis would be questioned by the Secret Service on two more occasions. The last session lasted some ten hours and was held in the office of Washington DC Lawyer, Steve Best. At that time, Best called Paul Gardner, and with government agents listening in, walked him through everything that had happened. The Secret Service investigators heard Gardner say the Salahis were always 100% approved to attend the welcoming ceremony and that up until the very last minute, his friend Michele Jones was still attempting to try to get the Salahis seated for the dinner. This session ended well after midnight with Michaele in tears and Steve Best telling his clients, “Now that the Secret Service knows the whole story, this thing should be over by tomorrow!”

Little did he know there was a super-sized three ring circus brewing on Capitol Hill.