“Chairman Issa has an ability to escape from aides assigned to accompany him during events,” then-29-year-old Becca Glover Watkins, the press secretary for the Issa-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told the Daily Beast in a Jan. 18, 2012 post.

It’s complicated

North County Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, apparently assured of reelection this fall in his safe Republican seat, has been largely flying under the national radar of late. That’s a change from his political salad days, when the billionaire car alarm magnate bathed in the spotlight as a powerful House committee chairman with help from a glamorous young media assistant, whom he has since quietly married and who has subsequently dropped from public view.

“Chairman Issa has an ability to escape from aides assigned to accompany him during events,” then-29-year-old Becca Glover Watkins, the press secretary for the Issa-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, told the Daily Beast in a Jan. 18, 2012 post. “You have to pay attention to where he is, because if you don’t, he’ll slip away and stop in at another office or event.

Darrell Issa seems to have decided that 38 years is enough.

“‘Nothing’s more nerve-wracking than not knowing where he is 10 minutes before he’s set to be on national television in front of millions of people. But he always makes it on time with a huge grin on his face. I’ve gotten used to the challenge of keeping track of him now, but there were a few times when I thought he had been kidnapped.”

Working under Issa was hectic, she continued: “Our days can be very long, so we keep the local Chinese restaurants in business. I usually start early, at 6:15 am, when I read the ‘overnights,’ the news stories that come out while we sleep. I try to get home at a reasonable hour to see my husband and our dog, Poppy, but ‘reasonable’ is a moving target: it usually means 8 or 9 pm.”

More of her backstory was related in a January 28, 2008 post by the Washington Examiner. “Becca Glover, sister of Washington hostess and Ashcroft Group lobbyist Juleanna Glover, recently got engaged to Pepper Watkins, her boyfriend of four years,” says the account. “Watkins, who is a graduate student at Columbia, got down on one knee and proposed to Glover with a diamond ring that has been in his family since the 19th century. A wedding date hasn’t been finalized, but Glover expects the wedding to take place in the late fall of this year, or spring of next.” Concludes the cheerful item, “The news will dismay many of Washington’s social bachelors, who have gotten used to fawning over Glover at her big sister’s parties.” In an October 1, 2009 post by the Washingtonian, Glover Watkins, identified as “an account director at 3-Dog Agency,” described her husband as “a huge fan of The Sartorialist, a fashion blog that really helped him define his classic style. He also pays close attention to fit and proportion because he’s so slender.” Write-ups like that elevated Glover Watkins to the top of Washington’s top staffer party lists, but she got her biggest break on the national stage in early 2011 when Issa dumped Kurt Bardella, deputy communications director for Issa’s Oversight committee, after a series of leaks by him to the New York Times, per a March 2, 2011 Politico post. Glover Watkins soon took command of Issa’s spin machine.

Becca Glover seems to have found love with her old boss.

Fast forward to July 24, 2018, when Issa filed papers to split from his wife of 38 years, Kathy, per a San Diego Superior Court divorce filing posted online by the Times of San Diego. Six months earlier, Issa had announced he wouldn’t run for reelection, opening the way for Democrat Mike Levin to claim Issa’s 49th District seat in November. But just two years later, Issa returned to the House by winning the race for the safe Republican 48th District spot vacated by convicted felon Duncan Hunter, Jr., who Issa recommended for a pardon that was ultimately given by president Donald Trump.

Issa’s 2020 primary bid for the seat was endorsed by Hunter’s father, also named Duncan, who occupied the House seat before his son took over. “This is just Darrell Issa’s quid-pro-quo reward for shamelessly defending Duncan Hunter Jr.’s behavior for two years and suggesting Hunter be granted clemency instead of being punished,” said GOP San Diego ex-city councilman Carl DeMaio, who Issa knocked off in the primary.

Meanwhile, Glover had left Issa’s House gig and gone to work for the Trump administration, and later at the Brunswick Group, a self-styled D.C. “reputation management” firm. “Becca oversaw communications for 12 bureaus within the Department including the Census Bureau, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Patent and Trademark Office, and International Trade Administration,” per a January 3, 2022 announcement of her appointment as deputy chief of staff & communications director for GOP Virginia Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin, then setting up for a run for the presidency that was not to be. “Becca Glover — a Trump alumna, an architect of Youngkin’s big smooch with Fox News and other right-wing friendlies and the wife of Obama tormentor U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California — is leaving the administration Dec. 15,” reported the Richmond Times-Dispatch in a December 7, 2023 story that pulled the curtain from Glover’s low-profile marital status. “It’s not clear whether she’s weary of the Richmond-D.C. commute or decided that Youngkin is damaged goods.”

Alden goes to court

Can the San Diego Union-Tribune be saved by cash from Microsoft and OpenAI? That’s the long-shot possibility raised by a new lawsuit filed against the two artificial intelligence giants by New York-based Alden Global Capital, which owns the U-T and hundreds of other papers around the country, many of which are facing feared shutdowns due to rapidly falling advertising and subscription revenue.

“In the complaint, the publications accuse OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of copyrighted articles without permission to train and feed their generative AI products, including ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot,” reported the New York Times in an April 30 dispatch.

“We’ve spent billions of dollars gathering information and reporting news at our publications, and we can’t allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the Big Tech playbook of stealing our work to build their own businesses at our expense,” said Alden papers chieftain Frank Pine in a statement cited by the newspaper, which has launched its own suit against the deeply-pocketed AI twins. “In December, the Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of using copyrighted articles to train chatbots that then competed with the paper as a source of news and information. Microsoft has sought to have parts of that lawsuit dismissed. It also argued that the Times had not shown actual harm and that the large language models that drive chatbots had not replaced the market for news articles. OpenAI has filed a similar argument”...Meanwhile, Alden-owned MediaNews Group is out hiring for two new positions in the U-T’s advertising department, including Digital Sales Manager with yearly pay between $110,000 and $120,000, and Digital Account Executive, to get $64,430, raising hope that the paper, even if it folds its print version, will still be around in some form on the Internet.

— Matt Potter

(@sdmattpotter)

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