Not a Crook: Fred Malek (#56)

Fred Malek: 59, Washington, D.C. $145,950. Party: R

By L.J. Davis

Fred Malek received his 15 minutes of fame in the 1970s as deputy director of CREEP (Committee to Re-elect the President), the Nixon White House operation behind Watergate. Unlike many of his former associates, Malek walked--but not out of Washington. After lying low for a time, he made his political comeback as a leader in the Republican Party in the late 1980s, only to resign as deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1988 when an ugly incident from his past came to light: At Nixon's behest, he had drawn up a list of Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where Nixon thought a "Jewish cabal" was out to get him. Nonetheless, Malek rebounded yet again in 1992 as campaign manager for the Bush/Quayle ticket.

Now a GOP fundraiser, Malek once wrote a most explicit description of political influence. In a briefing paper on the federalbudget to Nixon in 1972, Malek asserted: "All major grants and construction decisions for the next fiscal year were reviewed prior to the finalization of the budgets to ensure to the extent possible they impacted on politically beneficial areas."