Scary Tales from the Tapes

Occasionally in all the babble, Cisneros appears to come to his senses. "What if you tape record me or something?" he wonders during one of the chats. "My tape recorder? Henry, I don't even have a tape recorder in the house," Medlar says. Later in the conversations, Cisneros declares, "Okay, I'm going to be square with you, and I don't even know if I'm being taped or not. Am I?" Says Medlar: "No, you're not." Then comes the biblical third denial from Medlar, after Cisneros, somewhat pleadingly, says: "Well, again, I don't know whether you're taping me or not."

With Cisneros' suspicions about taping already expressed, conversations like this one, when the two are discussing Cisneros' payments to Medlar, take on a distinct twilight-zone air.

Medlar: "Henry, you're going to be going through confirmation where they're going to be asking you questions."

Cisneros: "The subject [of payments] probably is not even going to come up."
Medlar: "And what if it does?"
Cisneros: "If it does I'll tell them what we agreed and the only person who can upset me at that point -- and I mean serious -- I'm talking contempt of Congress, jail, is you ...." He quickly adds: "I don't know what purpose that would serve -- I intend to do right."

This from a guy who tells Medlar the biggest previous blemish in his FBI file stemmed from a college-era outing when he and some underage buddies were busted for having two cases of beer in their car.

Once Cisneros has won the HUD appointment, he tells Medlar, "I honestly wish I wasn't doing it for a lot of reasons. The department is in a whole lot worse shape than I thought." In another conversation he allows, "I will be pretty well wiped out if this department is as bad as it looks."

After perusing the transcripts, one might draw the conclusion that Cisneros is now indeed pretty well wiped out politically -- but not because of anything that has happened at