The premise is as absurd as it is disingenuous. It is also critical to the Bush administration's ability to keep a dirty little secret.

In the past week, two White House spokesmen have told me they don't know the name of a Republican staff member who refused to let three people attend President Bush's March 21 Social Security "town hall" meeting in Denver. The three were banned because they arrived in a car with a "No More Blood for Oil" bumper sticker.

The White House doesn't know who did this because the White House doesn't care to find out.

Alex Young, Leslie Weise and Karen Bauer now call themselves the Denver Three. They say they were forced to leave the nonpartisan, taxpayer-financed Denver forum an hour before the president arrived.

They also say they were told the person who escorted them out was a Secret Service agent. He wasn't.

"Our agency wasn't involved," said Lon Garner, the agent in charge of Denver's Secret Service district.

The person who made Young, Weise and Bauer leave was a Republican staff member wearing an earpiece and an orange lapel pin that resembled the red lapel pins worn by Secret Service agents, according to Garner.

"They were physically removed as a result of the bumper sticker," attorney Dan Recht said after accompanying Young, Weise and Bauer to a Monday meeting with the Secret Service. "That's illegal and outrageously un-American."

It's nearly Nixonian.

"There were no allegations that they acted improperly," Recht said of his clients, who may sue.

The Secret Service has interviewed the man who removed them but refused to name him.

"We can't give out that information because the person was not an agent," Secret Service spokesman Jonathan Cherry told me Tuesday. "You need to talk to the White House or the local organizers (of the Denver presidential visit)."

I tried.

"I wasn't there," said assistant presidential press secretary Allen Abney. "It's hard for me to have specifics of what actually took place."

Asked about the Colorado situation at his national news briefing, Bush press secretary Scott McClellan said he didn't know "all the specific circumstances." He promised to look into the "marching orders" for who can get in to the president's Social Security "conversations."

"We welcome a diversity of views at the events," he said.

You can't tell that by what happened in Denver. The Denver meeting was an official White House event, coordinated by Washington.

Despite repeated requests, the White House has provided no information about the staff that came to Denver.

Colorado Rep. Mark Udall, a Democrat, has asked the Secret Service for a clarification of events, Udall's chief of staff said Tuesday.

The runaround for the Denver Three seems to be a full sprint, just as it was in February for the Fargo 42.

The Fargo 42 mysteriously appeared on a list of folks banned from Bush's nonpartisan, taxpayer-financed Social Security "town meeting" in North Dakota. Most were part of a Howard Dean meet-up group. But some had done nothing but write letters to the editor that were critical of the president.

Fargo City Commissioner Linda Coates doesn't know who put her name on the no-admittance list or why. When the list leaked to the Fargo Forum newspaper, Coates got a ticket from Fargo's Republican mayor and went anyway.

"This is thought-police stuff," Coates said. "It's the new normal. It arouses suspicion about people by default. It's really a dark strategy."

And one the White House promised not to repeat after the Fargo fiasco, which the Bush administration finally blamed on an "overzealous" volunteer.

I asked Abney if volunteers in Denver got to wear earpieces and lapel pins and act like Secret Service agents.

Surprise. He said he didn't know.

Jim Spencer's column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

© 2005 Denver Post

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