The blame game gets a bad rap, but the badder rap should go to people like Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson (D. La.), who commandeered two big trucks and a helicopter to go check out his property on Friday, September 2nd, just as the relief effort was finally starting to get off the ground. According to the ABC exclusive, Jefferson requested National Guard troops to escort him on a tour of his district, then had the truck take him to his home in an unscheduled stop (Jefferson says he did not request the armed detail). According to ABC News, Jefferson went into his house for about an hour while the soldiers waited, until he came out with his laptop, a few suitcases and "a box about the size of a small refrigerator."

Jefferson says that the extraction mission only took a few minutes and that the soldiers were assisting his neighbors, anyway.

The situation was compounded though when the truck got stuck on Jefferson's lawn. They flagged down a helicopter -- in the midst of a search-and-rescue mission, already with four rescued NOLA residents on board -- which came by for about 45 minutes before continuing on its primary mission (you know, to rescue people who didn't have the army escort them home to retrieve laptops and suitcases). A second truck was dispatched to rescue the first truck. This was Friday, September 2nd.

The full ABC report is pretty scathing -- sample commentary from a homeland security expert and ABC News consultant Jerry Hauer: "Forty-five minutes can be an eternity to somebody that is drowning, to somebody that is sitting in a roof... [a helicopter] needs to be used for its primary purpose during an emergency." At the bottom, there's a nice tidbit about how prior to Katrina, Rep. Jefferson's homes in New Orleans and D.C. were raided as part of a federal investigation. Apparently they found a hunk o' cash in the freezer. Hmmm. Good thing he saved those suitcases and that refrigerator-sized box.

Nice work on ABC's part; we haven't given them a shout-out yet for their coverage (so many Anderson Cooper Google alerts, so little time) but they certainly deserve it for this one. Jake Tapper of ABC's Washington bureau broke this story with help from Sarah Rosenberg, Chris Isham and Ted Gerstein.