On Leave: Vivek Kundra has left the Building (Opinion)

A dispatch from NBC White House Correspondent Chuck Todd on MSNBC's First Read blog confirmed an unwelcome but perhaps inevitable development at the end of a very long day:

A senior White House official tells NBC News that the president's choice to be the nation's chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, has taken a leave from his position until further details become known of the FBI's investigation into Kundra's Washington, D.C. IT offices.

While the FBI has said Kundra is not connected to their investigation of a contractor that was under Kundra's supervision, the appearance apparently is enough to force Kundra to take a leave from the White House.

This line is worth repeating: "FBI has said Kundra is not connected to [its year long] investigation."  Indeed, First Read was the first to make clear that Kundra was not a target of the FBI investigation.

UPDATES (03-12-09): Newsweek online ran this extended piece from the AP on the raids, the arrests and the alleged scheme.  Separately, Government Technology noted Kundra's recent rise and recognition within the public sector IT community.

WTOP Radio tied the pair of arrests in a DC government office building to an "Obama appointee" in its web headline but only clarified that "Kundra has not been linked to Thursday's raid" in the 18th and last paragraph of its story.

The Washington Post's first report of the raid on the DC CTO's office, including the arrest of a member of its staff and a contractor in a bribery sting, noting in the fourth paragraph that the office had been headed by Kundra until last week. Later in the day, the paper added a link to a full story that clarified that Kundra "is not suspected of any wrongdoing" -- another eight paragraphs later.

Politico's Ben Smith appended a one sentence update to a post called "FBI raids office of D.C. CTO, Obama appointee," noting "Kundra himself is not a target."

The Huffington Post was less attentive. Its story remained unchanged all day, leaving room for all manner of speculation:

FBI agents have arrested a District of Columbia government worker and another man while they search the offices of the city's chief technology officer.  The head of that city office, Vivek Kundra, recently left to take a White House technology post.

The private, non-partisan Performance Institute echoed the theme in a tweet, tying the raid to the non-targeted individual in Twitter's characteristically cryptic 140 word dispatches, "FBI agents have made two arrests after raiding the D.C. office of the man tapped to be President Obama's chief information officer."

The breaking news came as the March 10 issue of Business Week hit the news stands.  The BW profile of Kundra covers familiar territory about his penchant for open source development, data sharing across institutional lines, web 2.0 possibilities, and the cloud as the next platform for governing.  The subhead is strangely prescient, "Vivek Kundra says he'll improve the federal government's technology, but he faces an immense challenge."  And the challenge just got a little more tangled today.

The news -- as sketchy as it is -- and the accompanying headlines -- some of which are downright misleading -- created all manner of concern and confusion in the public sector IT community.  The subject line in one early e-mail made the point in the cryptic and crude language of texting -- "DC raids -- WTF?"

For his part, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty defended of his former CTO and the work of his office in comments to the Washington Post on what the district will do now that the investigation has come to this point.

 

Kundra is still standing -- on leave from his new federal appointment, but still standing. The appointment may never have been made if the raid had come a week earlier, particularly given the rush to judgment reflected in the online comments attracted by the stories on the sites noted above.

And that is the part of this affair that is so frustrating: in a single news cycle, we have been witness to a rush to judgment that presumes guilt, by association or otherwise, based on word of an investigation the details of which remain sealed. Surely, at this point, the presumption must be with Kundra, not against him. And for those of us tempted to say more than we know, it is time to let the process be the process.