The Disney executive/GOP operative who Matt Stoller identified (
"Mickey Mouse's Karl Rove, Zenia Mucha") as probably a big part of why Disney has begun pushing right-wing propaganda and why they're taking a hard line on communications over it, has handled ugly Republican scandals before.
Zenia Mucha is responsible for "communications policies and strategic positioning" and "media relations and communications strategy" at Disney. Before moving to Disney in late 2000, she worked for NY Governor George Pataki as a senior policy adviser and helped him survive a major scandal.
As his
closest advisor, she helped him survive the
payoff-to-get-out-of-prison scandal (
PDF) that should have blown the lid off the Pataki administration but instead was successfully managed and eventually shushed out of public view despite the lingering stench.
As Stoller says of Disney's "Path To 9-11" propaganda-fest, "it's becoming a little clearer who has been ordering everyone to lie about it."
Brief version of the (incredibly tangled, sensational, and sordid) Pataki parole scandal:
Pataki fundraiser and Korean community leader Yung Soo Yoo had approached three families before the 1994 election, saying he could help get their sons, all convicted violent felons, out of prison if they contributed to the Pataki campaign. One man was indeed released on parole two years after his family donated.
Yung Soo Yoo is a long-time GOP fund-raiser and get-out-the-Korean-vote-guy who has attended a state dinner in the Bush White House, testified before a Congressional subcommittee that he worked with Korean intelligence to keep witnesses from testifiying in a Congressional bribery scandal, been convicted of bank fraud, and then served in 1994 on Pataki's transition team and as chairman of Christine Todd Whitman's economic task force. Read all about him in the congressional committee report.
And what happened with this sensational case, records of which are not particularly easy to find online? Despite documentary evidence and testimony that there had been pressure from the governor's office on parole officials to give early release to three Korean-American felons whose families had contributed substantial sums of money to the Pataki campaign?
Yet all the devastating evidence of the corrupting of the state parole process--detailed in two trials and the guilty pleas of two other high-ranking state officials--has disappeared into the ethical ether.
No one close to Pataki was ever charged. A good part of the credit (blame) for managing the communications strategy in the aftermath that helped save Pataki's bacon should probably go to the judiciously uncommunicative communicator Zenia Mucha, who was one of those subpoenaed in the investigation. She has been described as:
perhaps the most feared woman in Albany during the Pataki years. Mucha worked in the same job for Senator Alfonse D'Amato and she clearly believed that the press is not the friend of the politician, that you use them when you can, you never trust them and you keep the people you're working for away from places where they can make mistakes... [I]naccessibility [is] a hallmark of Mucha's brand of client protection.
If you want to read more about this scandal itself and the mind-boggling way it was successfully brushed under the rug, try here, here, here, and especially here. If you have NYT Select (I only have access to abstracts) and can add more details, please do so in comments.