Michaele and Tareq Salahi

There was a lot of ruckus last week over the stories that White House party crasher and Real Housewives of D.C. castmember Michaele Salahi had left her husband to take up with guitarist for Journey, Neal Schon, while he was on tour. At first Michaele’s husband, Tareq, tried to claim that his wife was kidnapped. Tareq reported Micheale missing to the FBI and cried to the local news about it. Then he realized that she had just left his sorry ass, so he leaked a bunch of stories to TMZ claiming that their sick dog died of a broken heart when she left. It was pathetic, and he even filmed the dog’s funeral and burial and gave (sold maybe) the video and photos of it to TMZ. Tareq filed for divorce and we got to see Michaele and Tareq’s prenup, in which Michaele forfeits her rights to any money if she commits adultery.

Tareq did an interview with E! that aired last night telling his side of the story. He thought everything was fine in his marriage until his wife disappeared, and then he said he received an e-mail at the main address for his winery from Schon containing an attached photo of Schon’s pen1s. Really. Tareq showed a printout of it on E! and everything, but they blurred most of it out. Tareq called Michaele a “groupie slut” and warned her that Schon, who is also married, has been married five times, and whose wife of a whole two months got cheated on too*, is bad news and will cheat on her too. He’s probably right.

Meanwhile Michaele and Neal have a new interview with The Daily Beast describing how they got together after a separation of nearly 15 years from their first romance. The highlights are:

In my book, Cirque du Salahi, the 46-year-old Michaele first revealed she has suffered from multiple sclerosis for nearly 20 years and the disease was the deciding factor when choosing her husband. She had been dating both Neal and Tareq in the late ’90s (for the record, she dated Neal first) and there came a time she had to make a life decision.

“I chose Tareq over Neal because I thought life would be less stressful living on a vineyard in Virginia. Life on the road with a rock band … well, I thought I might not have been able to keep up.” Yet during research for the book last year, in private talks away from her husband, Michaele made it clear she still had deep feelings for Neal.

So how did they ultimately come together just 10 days after they saw each other backstage at a Journey concert in Bristow, Va.? The couple now admits they had been communicating via text “for a while” over a device a friend had sneaked to Michaele so the controlling Tareq wouldn’t find out she had a pipeline to the outside world. (Repeated e-mails and calls to Tareq Salahi for comment for this story have gone unanswered.)

“Neal was like, ‘Are we going to do this forever?’ And I said, ‘No, we’re not,’” Michaele said of the moment she realized it was time to make another life decision. “I began to see he really loved me. I had to begin to feel it completely–in my soul.” That was when she knew she would leave her husband.

Neal sent complimentary tickets and backstage passes to the Salahis to come to the Labor Day weekend concert being held just 20 miles east of their home in Linden, Va. The ever-sociable Tareq showed up backstage with a video camera, Michaele, and Michaele’s friend Irina. He urged the women to surround Neal and kiss him, “Ahhh. There you go … hugs and kisses for Neal!!! Rock on, Journey!” Tareq is heard cooing in the background. (Tareq would later supply that video and other materials to the gossip website TMZ in an effort to humiliate his wife.)

Tareq had no way of knowing exactly what had happened just moments earlier in Schon’s dressing room. But if he did have an inkling of his wife’s behavior that night, he chose to put on a happy public face.

“What happened was … she takes off her wedding ring, OK, right in front of Tareq—takes it off,” Neal told The Daily Beast, sounding astonished. “And then she proceeds to come into my dressing room where I’m sitting down. I have tennis shoes on and she’s, like, nine feet tall over me.”

Neal’s voice took on a joyful tone as he told the story, and I could hear Michaele giggling in the background. He continued: “And she looks down at me like she’s standing on stilts and says, “I love YOU. And, that’s never gonna change. And when that happened I said, ‘Get over here! This has taken 15 years!’”

In retelling their story on the phone these not-too-young lovers sounded like teenagers who had just gotten the keys to Dad’s car. They were finally together and nothing else mattered.

The night of the concert, Sept. 4, Neal urged Michaele to get on the tour bus with him. “I was pretty close to doing it,” Michaele said. “But then I thought, No, that’s not who I am. That would be public humiliation for Tareq.” She explained to Neal that she had obligations and things to wrap up over the next few weeks but she told him that night: “We will be together. I promise.” She went home with her husband that night.

Nine days later, Michaele says she realized she couldn’t stay. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone, but I realized I was hurting myself.” And, according to Michaele, “Tareq was too controlling.” Neal jumped in to elaborate. “He says, ‘Don’t go out of the house, you can’t have any money, I took all the money, you don’t have a telephone, you can’t drive’—plus, there are cameras in every room!” (After spending considerable research time in the Salahi house in mid-2010, I can confirm it contains a sophisticated surveillance system.)

Last Tuesday, Tareq left home to go to the family’s nearby Oasis Vineyard to ready things for an upcoming bankruptcy auction that was held this past weekend. He did not know that Michaele and Neal had been texting back and forth:

“Michaele come, I don’t want to wait anymore,” Schon wrote. Michaele agreed, and told The Daily Beast, “I was going crazy. Because when you want to be with someone that bad, you start to go crazy. He sent someone to come get me. I got on a plane by myself and I just went. I just walked away from everything.”

[From The Daily Beast]

So Michaele chose Tareq back in 90s because of her illness, but she meant to chose the Journey guy, who has been married five times. She would have burned through that guy in a year or two if she would have picked him back then instead of Tareq. How many groupies has he been with? It’s probably into the dozens at least.

And of course Michaele wants a reality show with Neal and hopes to be a singer. The Chicago Sun Times reports that she’s working with Neal to “both shepherd her singing ‘talent’ and participate in a TV show that apparently is being pitched to a couple of independent production companies.”

Props to all of you who mentioned Journey songs in our last story on this, particularly that Schon had welcomed Michaele with “Open Arms,” that they shouldn’t “Stop Believin’” in their crusty love, and that she was no longer acting “Faithfully” to Tareq.

*The Daily Beast reports that Schon’s marriage in Paris two months ago might not have been legally binding. Still, Schon had been with his latest partner for two years.

Check out this guy’s bad face lift.

photo credit: WENN

Remember the Salahis? They crashed that White House state dinner, were revealed to be complete scam artists along with all the associated financial problems and lawsuits (17) that go along with that, and Michaele was on Real Housewives of D.C. and got kicked off Celebrity Rehab. In the middle they got into public feuds with several people including Whoopi Goldberg and Michael Lohan.

Well there was some pretty amusing drama with them yesterday. Michaele’s husband Tareq freaked out and told the press that his wife was probably kidnapped since she called him from an Oregon cell phone and was “cryptic” after going missing. He contacted authorities and was crying when he spoke to the local news about it. Only his wife was alive and well and had run off with her lover, the lead guitarist for Journey, with whom she’d been having an affair for six months.

Tareq reported his wife Michaele missing on Tuesday, but the Real Housewives of D.C. star tells authorities she’s fine.

The Warren County Sheriff’s Office released a statement Wednesday saying they had spoken with Michaele and she “assured the deputy that she had left the residence with a good friend and was where she wanted to be. Mrs. Salahi advised that she did not want Mr. Salahi to know where she was.”

It turns out that she’s actually with Journey guitarist Neal Schon in Tennessee, where the band has a gig with Foreigner.

“Nobody kidnapped her and they are in Memphis together,” a Journey rep tells TMZ.

Why she was with Schon wasn’t immediately explained.

Tareq had called the sheriff to say that he hadn’t seen his wife for six hours and was concerned because he received a phone call from her from an unfamiliar Oregon number and believed she was under duress.

Soon after, Deputy Mike Glavis spoke with Michaele on the phone and said she was “calm” and “engaged in the conservation.”

“Mrs. Salahi advised Deputy Glavis that she was very sorry that the Sheriff’s Office had to be involved, but she did not want to be home right now,” the statement said.

Tareq was then informed that his wife was fine, but told TMZ he believed she was forced to make the call by her kidnapper.

“We are reaching to the public pleading desperately for your help,” Tareq said in a statement. “We are asking the public to please be on the lookout for her, and if found please approach her and contact the authorities to intervene and that she may be forced to say she is OK, when in fact she is not and being held under possible abduction.”

[From People]

I watched the video of this guy and was prepared to mock him, but I genuinely felt sorry for him instead. I’m a sucker like that. It seemed like he really did think they were happy and that something had happened to his wife to make her leave like that. It’s not just the men who lie, cheat and break their partner’s hearts. Still, these two are famewhores and opportunists of the worst kind. Any sympathy I could feel for them is fleeting. I would accuse them of staging this for publicity, but I doubt that Tareq is that good of an actor. It looks like he’ll have to find another partner in crime.

The Salahis are shown in April. When they notice the cameras all of a sudden they’re posing together.

Credit: WENN.com

White House Party Crasher and all around grifter Michaele Salahi was cast on Celebrity Rehab this season, along with such luminaries as Michael Lohan, Bai Ling and Dwight Gooden. It’s known that Michael Lohan is supposedly sober, as he’s some kind of sanctimonious preachy sobriety coach for teenagers when he’s not giving press conferences about his daughter. Lohan admitted as much when he was cast, and said that he was hoping to get treatment for his “anger issues.” It was Michaele Salahi who just got kicked off for not being addicted to anything, though. Like the e-mail “evidence” that the Salahis gave to “prove” they were invited to the state dinner, her husband Tareq swears he has e-mails that show that producers wanted Michaele to fake an addiction. (At least that’s what he implied.)

But that’s apparently why former Real Housewives of D.C. matron Michaele Salahi was more or less fired by Dr. Drew Pinsky today.

“The treatment program that Celebrity Rehab documents is intended for individuals with serious substance abuse and addiction issues,” VH1 said in a statement to E! News. “Prior to the taping of the current season, producers were advised that Michaele Salahi met the criteria to be treated in this setting. However, professional assessments spanning from that time to the present, found that she did not meet such criteria.

“As a result, she is no longer participating in the program.”

A rep for Salahi said yesterday that the self-proclaimed philanthropist, who didn’t appear to suffer from addiction during Real Housewives, was hoping Dr. Drew would “be able to assist her about everything she has endured over the last year.”

Salahi revealed in September that she suffers from multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease that attacks nerve cells around the brain and spinal cord.

Dr. Drew did a full medical workup on Salahi and she is doing fine, a production source told Radar Online. But apparently she and her husband are pretty pissed!

“She was really leaning on Dr. Drew, who is a respected doctor to get her through some of the issues after the White House, when she went to Congress, when she went into relapse with her multiple sclerosis,” Tareq Salahi told Radar.

“My wife takes her health situation very seriously, she has a real diagnosis of multiple sclerosis,” he continued. “You know, we can show you a bunch of emails about what they wanted her to pretend to be, therefore, but that’s going to come out later on with one of the major networks.”

[From E! Online]

A chronic illness and an inability to tell the truth do not constitute an addiction. (An inability to eat full meals might, however.) Then again, from what I understand the Celebrity Rehab model of addiction is rather loose and is based on whoever they can get to be on the show. Remember Rachel Uchitel and her “love” and Ambien addiction? Sadly, there are celebrities on that show who are truly addicted to drugs as well. Bassist Mike Starr of Alice in Chains was on Celebrity Rehab in 2009, and he just died at the age of 44 from as-of-yet unknown causes. He was arrested for felony of a controlled substance last month.

Meanwhile Tareq was staying with Michael Lohan, who just kicked him out of his West Hollywood apartment for not paying the bills. Radar has video of Michael complaining about Tareq, and suggests that Michael may have staged it for publicity. Given all the scams that Tareq and Michaele have pulled, it’s likely Michael was telling the truth and that Tareq didn’t pay his share.

There’s news that trainwreck Sean Young, 51, will join the cast of Celebrity Rehab, probably in Michaele’s place. Young was kicked out of an awards ceremony in early 2008 for being drunk and disorderly, and the decline of her career is generally blamed on her eccentric, probably drunken behavior and the way she stalked James Woods after their breakup in the late 80s. She’ll be an interesting addition for sure. Look at this crazy bitch. She’s holding a bunny and wearing a fur coat. She brought that rabbit with her too, no one else at that event was holding it.

Photos of the Salahis from October, 2010 credit: WENN.com. Photos of Sean Young from December 2010 (bunny pictures) and April, 2010 credit: PRPhotos

The more we hear about the White House party crashers, The Salahis, the worse they sound. Michaele is starring on the new Real Housewives of DC and in the press tour she’s shown that she’s a real piece of work. She regularly hogs the spotlight, upsetting the other castmembers, and was recently in a feud with Whoopi Goldberg that she and her husband played up for maximum publicity.

The Salahis also have very shady business dealings, and have declared bankruptcy along with being sued over a dozen times. They also started a charity through which they’ve been accused of embezzling funds. They sound like scam artists, and husband Tareq is even feuding with his own mother over a family winery he allegedly ran into the ground.

Now Star has an interview with a former employee of the Salahis who worked with them in their home in Virginia. The conditions were disgusting, according to a woman who was willing to go on the record with her full name and photo. The home was filthy and papers and junk were stacked around. Of course the Salahis ended up owing this woman $800 in wages, just like all the other employees and vendors they’ve bilked over the years.

Alex was hired after answering a classified ad in April for a job as agreet and driver with the Salahis’ wine tour business. “Tareq interviewed me, and although I got the job, he seemed genuinely perturbed that I didn’t know who he or his wife was,” she tells Star. “He actually asked me, ‘Don’t you recognize us?’”

Shortly after, Alex became Michaele’s personal assistant. “Over the enxt three months, I scheduled their appointments, answered phone calls, worked as their event coordinator, and was their personal driver – all at $10 an hour.” Alex says the Salahi’s home was “an absolute mess when I started working there in April.” Though the house looks spotless on RHODC – which was filmed in 2009 – “it was almost like a hoarder’s house, with paper stacked up everywhere.” There were also dog hair and dead bugs that seemed to be all over the floor – and old food would be sitting on the stove for weeks!…

Part of Alex’s job was helping Michaele, 44, pick out her day-to-day wardrobe – a task that proved messier than she could have imagined! “Michaele constantly sprays herself with orange self-tanner, and it gets all over everything, especially her clothes. And since she borrows a lot of her outfits from boutiques and then returns them after she wears them, it creates friction with the store owners…

“My first impression of Michaele was that she was really frail – and I never saw her take a single bite of food the whole time I worked for her,” Alex claims, “She would only sip hot chocolate.”

“It was like pulling teeth to get my pay from them.

“Last June, I worked the entire day of their annual polo tournament, organizing the event, helping to set up the equipment, dealing with the media and driving people around. At the end of the day, Michaele and Tareq left me and three other girls in the dark to break everything down and clean everything up.

“At that moment, I was owed $800 in salary, so I texted Tareq and told him if he didn’t come back and pay me, I was just going to leave. He kept ignoring me – so I left. And a few days later, I got an e-mail from him saying I was not to contact them again. I feel totally used!”

[From Star Magazine, print edition, August 30, 2010]

Yesterday we reported on a story from In Touch where Michaele claimed she ate just one bowl of cereal and a salad with chicken for the entire day. If this former employee’s story is accurate, she might not even eat that much.

This is frankly kind of fascinating, and reminds me of this very well-to-do woman I saw on Oprah years ago who was so well put together but lived in the most disgusting conditions. I also enjoy watching Clean House, after which I end up throwing out crap and straightening up. (The latest Messiest Home in America was particularly disturbing.) On Clean House, Niecy Nash explains that clutter is an outward manifestation of an inward condition. I guess in the Salahi’s case they’re dirty, disgusting people with no sense of personal responsibility. (Not that I would say that about everyone that keeps a messy home, but in this case it seems accurate given all we know about them.)

Whoopi touches Salahi’s back at 1:55

White House party crasher Michaele Salahi is one of the castmembers on the upcoming Real Housewives of DC, which premieres tonight on Bravo. She was on The View Wednesday with her co-stars and was in a lame typical argument with another housewife named Lynda from the show. Their argument was over an incident at a promotional party in which Salahi’s husband threw a glass of red wine on Lynda after she taunted Michaele by calling her an anorexic. Lynda then threw a scotch back at the husband, Tareq. These two fools were arguing back and forth about it on the View’s couches and were taking up time. Whoopi Goldberg came in from backstage and gently touched Michaele’s back to get her attention and said something about the White House. (The video is above, but you can see Whoopi touching Salahi better on Radar’s video around the :55 mark.) They then changed the topic to the Salahis showing up uninvited to that State Dinner last year, something they continue to deny despite being called to testify as part of a Congressional investigation. (They never said anything about it and took the fifth the whole time.)

Then backstage something went down with Whoopi. Michaele claims that Whoopi burst into the room and asked “did you say I f’ing hit you?!” after which Whoopi let loose with a bunch of expletives. According to Michaele, she voiced her concerns to a producer that Whoopi “grabbed” her, and that she didn’t think it was appropriate to ask her to change the subject that way. Whoopi got wind of it and went after her verbally. After Whoopi calmed down, she tried to apologize and explain to Michaele that she regularly swears and that it wasn’t a big deal. Michaele wasn’t having it, though, and of course issued a statement through her lawyer about it. She also told the story on The Today Show the next day. (Video below.) Here’s more, including the detail that Michelle conveniently left out of her interview on The Today show that her husband demanded an apology and then tried to shove his Blackberry in Whoopi’s face to tape her response.

When Michaele Salahi and her Real Housewives of D.C. castmates — Mary Schmidt Amons, Lynda Erkiletian, Catherine Ommanney and Stacie Scott Turner — appeared on the ABC talk show, the newly-minted realty star was rattled after she said Whoopi Goldberg, who was offstage for the segment, walked on the set, touched her arm and tried to refocus her on the topic at hand: her alleged crashing of the White House state dinner last November.

Though the encounter occupied no more than several seconds of airtime, offstage, an ugly scene reportedly happened when Salahi and her husband Tareq complained to producers about what she tells PEOPLE was a “humiliating and torturous” experience at the hands of Goldberg — and her View co-hosts.

“The first encounter I had with this woman is her grabbing my arm and telling me to change the subject,” Salahi tells PEOPLE in a phone interview Thursday. “It was very inappropriate … They want to torture me. I didn’t know [being interviewed on the View] would be this horrific.”

During that interview segment, Salahi also exchanged heated words with her Housewives costar Erkiletian, who alleged that Tareq threw a glass of red wine on her at a recent press event in Los Angeles. (Salahi fired back that Erkiletian lobbed a glass of Scotch back in her husband’s face.) The interview was testy, and afterward Salahi said, “When I got off stage I was fine, but then I began to cry. Whoopi came in and said ‘Did you [expletive] say that I hit you?’ ”

According to a statement on ABC’s Web site, Salahi told producers that Goldberg “hit” her. Salahi tells PEOPLE she used the word “grab.”
Goldberg doesn’t deny the backstage confrontation happened but denies she hit Salahi. “You know how I [denied it],” she said, “choice words. And I make no apology for my choice words.”

But the situation escalated after Salahi’s husband Tareq intervened.

“Tareq, my husband, said you need to apologize to my wife,” Salahi tells PEOPLE. “Whoopi doesn’t like to be told what to do. He said, ‘We’re just guests and this is an inappropriate way to treat guests.’ “

But Goldberg says Tareq “got in [her] face, had his BlackBerry out and started taking pictures of me. And needless to say, I really went off on him. And there was even more choice words. It was so choice, you could have cut it with a knife and eaten them.”

At this point, Salahi says, “I was really sobbing. I just wanted to get out of there.”

While Goldberg had no more to say about the matter Thursday, and co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck read a statement on air from Salahi’s attorney reiterating that no charges were levied after the alleged White House crashing incident, Salahi says she doesn’t understand where all the purported hostility came from on the set of The View.

“Whoopi, I don’t know you. I never saw Sister Act,” she says. “I don’t know much about her. The fact that I have had no encounters with her except this hostility, I don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s just another really painful learning lesson.”

[From People]

The Salahis are represented by Michael Lohan’s lawyer, Lisa Bloom, who talked to the Daily Beast about the whole controversy. She said, in part “I think they treated her horribly. I think they defamed her [by asking about the party crashing on air]. I was really shocked by the way she was treated. It’s one thing to ask tough questions, it’s another to use defamatory language when you’ve been warned not to.” So Michaele was mad at Whoopi for yelling at her for allegedly making false claims, and she was mad that she got called out about the party crashing on The View.

The Salahis posted a notice on Facebook that they were going to talk about the incident and release the audio and video of Whoopi going ogg. They wrote in a now-deleted post “Salahis will address on Thursday Morning LIVE on National TV the outrageous abuse and exchange that took place on the ABC Show the View and a [sic] audio & video file from Whoopi Goldberg verbal attack to Michaele. Standby for details…”

Michaele did talk about the alleged “abuse” on the Today show, (video below) but she was supposed to be promoting her new show and her other castmembers were pissed that the focus was on her. A woman named Cat said very clearly that she’s over Michaele and the scotch-throwing chick Lynda Erkiletian claimed to have been friends with the Salahis for 15 years before their falling out. Lynda said “they live a very fake Bonnie & Clyde life” and added that they’re misusing funds that are supposed to go to charity, as reported by the Washington Post. Michaele countered “you’re so crazy and jealous.” Then the one woman who didn’t diss Michaele yet moved on to talk about the show. Stacie Scott Turnersaid that their new show was “more sophisticated than some of the other series have been. You will not see the hair pulling… weave pulling.” Hoda said “I heard about the drink throwing though.”

Oh and ABC has issued an official response to this ridiculousness:

“At one point during Michaele Salahi’s appearance on The View on Wednesday, Whoopi lightly touched Ms. Salahi to get her attention and said to her, “Excuse me, can you get back to the White House, please?,’ meaning could Ms. Salahi return to the original subject of the conversation. After the show, Ms. Salahi and her husband accused Whoopi of hitting Ms. Salahi. As the broadcast clearly shows, the accusation was completely unfounded and erroneous. After the show and after being told she was being accused of hitting Ms. Salahi, Whoopi proceeded to defend herself verbally from this baseless claim in a heated exchange with the Salahis.”

[via The Daily Beast]

You know the Salahis are loving this. Michaele gets to be the focus of the new show despite the fact that all her costars can’t stand her, and they have more publicity to shill their book. They’re con artists who live for controversy like this. It’s ripe that they don’t want to talk about the party crashing when we would have never heard of them if they didn’t sneak into a state dinner uninvited. I’m not team Whoopi though by any means. Maybe now we have a little insight about her reasons for defending Mel Gibson.

Salahi tells her side of the story at 1:20.

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The other housewives can’t stand Michaele

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Tareq and Michaele Salahi, the “party crashers” at the White House state dinner last Tuesday, went on The Today Show this morning to tell their side of the story. Michaele has a really husky Lohan-esque voice and she seemed a little looped to me in the video, like she had some pharmaceutical courage to achieve the ideal state of numbness before the interview. Maybe she’s always like that. Tareq kind of stumbled over his words and came across like a bumbling idiot. He had to be saved by Michaele when he started repeating himself. Overall he didn’t say much except that he was cooperating with the secret service, that they have “documentation” that supposedly amounts to an invitation, and that the fallout was really negative for them.

The two claimed they had “documentation via e-mail” that they were allowed at dinner, but it took them a while to get to the point. They were very sheepish and kind of wishy-washy when it came to confirming whether they were invited. To me they were saying one thing but they looked guilty as hell and didn’t seem convinced they were tell telling the truth.

The Salahis didn’t say who invited them and never used the words “invited” or “tickets.” They also said they’re “devastated” and that their “lives have been destroyed” by the negative press. Michaele ridiculously stated that everything she’d worked for over the past 44 years was “destroyed.”

This isn’t the first time these two were caught crashing a Washington event. They were told to leave a $20,000 per table Congressional Black Caucus dinner where Obama was the featured speaker. A spokesperson for the Congressional Black Caucus confirms that the Salahis were asked to leave when they sat in another couple’s seats and couldn’t show tickets.

Tareq said he was invited to that CBC event by a law firm and was a “proud guest of theirs.” He called the story that they were escorted out “another gossip rumor just unfortunately like how this story got started through a gossip column.” That’s just one example of how he really tripped over his words.

The spokesperson for the Congressional Black Caucus says that Bravo, which puts out the show “The Real Housewives of DC,” requested permission to film during the dinner. They were denied, and now she thinks there’s a connection and that the Salahis were the intended subject. Michaele is reportedly gunning for a place on “Real Housewives.” The Associated Press reports that Michaele and Tareq were filmed by Bravo preparing for the state dinner they “allegedly” crashed.

This story gets a little weirder. There’s a statement from a Pentagon official denying that she invited the Salahis to the State Dinner and stating that she didn’t have the authority to do so anyway. Apparently the Salahis tried to wrangle an invite out of her and when she shot them down they went anyway:

It was revealed that they communicated with a senior Pentagon official about going to the event, but the official denied that she helped the couple get in.

Michele Jones, a special assistant to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, said in a written statement issued through the White House that she never said or implied she would get the Salahis into the event.

“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,” Jones said. “Even though I informed them of this, they still decided to come.”

[From AP via Google]

It looks like these two have a history of trying to manipulate and influence people. As Jaybird reported yesterday, one of their businesses is in bankruptcy and they’ve been either the plaintiff or defendant in no less than 16 lawsuits. Through sheer will and scheming the Salahis managed to show up at the White House and hobnob with the President, Vice President and Chief of Staff. They’ve been busted now, though, and they come across like teenagers trying to spin behavior they know is wrong. The Salahis also claimed that despite previous reports they didn’t get paid for their Today Show interview and never asked for any money. Yeah, and they didn’t crash the White House either. Maybe no one would pony up their fee.

Photos are from Facebook. Despite how “devastated” Michaele is, she still has a public Facebook account with plenty of pictures from the event.