This is too rich.

When Claude Allen, President Bush’s longtime domestic-policy adviser, resigned suddenly on Feb. 9, it baffled administration critics and fans. The White House claimed that Allen was leaving to spend more time with his family, while the Washington Times speculated that the 45-year-old aide, a noted social conservative, might have quit to protest a new Pentagon policy about military chaplains. Allen himself never publicly explained the reason for his departure.

News today may shed light on the mystery of Allen’s resignation. According to the Montgomery County Police Department, Allen was arrested yesterday and charged in a felony theft and a felony theft scheme. According to a department press release, Allen conducted approximately 25 fraudulent “refunds” in Target and Hecht’s stores in Maryland. On Jan. 2, a Target employee apprehended Allen after observing him receive a refund for merchandise he had not purchased. Target then contacted the Montgomery County Police. According to a source familiar with the case, Target and the police had been observing Allen since October 2005.

Allen is charged with practicing a form of shoplifting called “refund fraud.”

So, who is Claude Allen? More below the fold.

LA Weekly, from January 14-20, 2005.

President Bush’s appointment of his new chief domestic-policy adviser, Claude Allen — a notorious homophobe, a ferocious enemy of abortion and an opponent of safe-sex education who for years has been one of the AIDS community’s principal enemies — is a huge victory for the social reactionaries of the Christian right.

Allen, who was named to his new position in the White House last week, had previously been a top aide at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). He was placed there by Karl Rove as a watchdog on then–HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, who had an exaggerated reputation as a “moderate” and who wasn’t entirely trusted by Rove to carry out — by administrative order — the social agenda of the Christian right, a key part of Rove’s successful plan to mobilize millions of Christer voters for Bush’s re-election.

Known as Rove’s enforcer, Allen wielded a heavy, censorious and punitive hand at HHS. In November 2001, Thompson loyally toed the Rove-Bush line when he put Allen in charge of supervising HHS’s audit of HIV-prevention spending. Allen led an HHS witch-hunt that investigated all of the AIDS service organizations (ASOs) receiving any federal funding (like New York City’s Gay Men’s Health Crisis) whose staff members had disrupted Tommy Thompson’s speech to the 14th Annual International AIDS Conference in Barcelona; they were there to protest Bush’s lethal do-nothingism about the AIDS pandemic. These audits were designed to intimidate ASOs into abandoning AIDS advocacy. A number of ASOs, like San Francisco’s Stop AIDS Project and half a dozen other California AIDS-fighting groups, were ultimately purged from receiving U.S. funding by the Allen-led witch-hunt because Allen didn’t like their science-based sex-education programs. Allen ordered Advocates for Youth, the leading national coalition for safe-sex ed, audited half a dozen times.

Moreover, Allen was the driving force to replace science-based sex ed with the failed policy of teaching that only abstinence prevents AIDS. A black conservative and religious primitive, Allen helped bludgeon the Centers for Disease Control, which reports to HHS, into purging safe-sex materials from its Web sites and into adopting mandatory new rules requiring AIDS-fighting groups to teach that condoms don’t work in preventing the spread of AIDS, as I reported in the L.A. Weekly last year (“Condom Wars,” June 25–July 1). When a federal judge found that a federally funded Louisiana abstinence program “illegally handed out Bibles, staged anti-abortion prayer rallies outside women’s clinics and had students perform Bible-based skits,” Allen refused to have the program audited, while continuing his repeated audit persecutions of effective AIDS-fighting groups teaching condom use.

Allen also enforced his abstinence-only line when he was commissioner of Health and Human Services for Virginia under right-wing GOP Governor Jim Gilmore. There, too, he bent public health priorities to the religious right’s agenda, and led a state-sponsored anti–safe sex crusade that he cooked up with a kooky abstinence-only Christer outfit called the Institute for Youth Development, which also claims that condoms don’t work to prevent AIDS and teaches children to fear, rather than understand, sex. As Allen said then of condom use, “It’s like telling your child, ‘Don’t use the car,’ but then leaving the keys in the Lamborghini and saying, ‘But if you do, buckle up.’”

Allen’s history as a gay-baiter goes back to his days as a top aide to the notorious homophobe Senator Jesse Helms. In 1984, Allen accused Helms’ Democratic challenger, then-Governor James Hunt, of having links to “queers,” “radical feminists,” socialists and unions (Hunt was, in fact, a Bible-quoting right-wing Dem.) And Allen forged his odious reputation as a black capo for the racist right when he continued working for Helms despite the senator’s militant opposition to making Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday.

This is just one more example of the false piety of the Rovian Right. Claude Allen, the President’s domestic policy advisor, was stealing from Target and Hecht’s. He portrayed himself as a upright holier-than-thou Christian, but he was a common thief. It’s incredible. Why wasn’t he stealing something more valuable, like some of the nine billion dollars missing in Iraq?