Michele Jones.
Ron Edmonds/AP Photo

Pentagon official Michele Jones.

The story of the White House state dinner crashers just gets ever more strange.

The Washington Post is reporting that the Tareq and Michaele Salahi apparently had an e-mail exchange with a Pentagon official that may have led the couple to believe they had scored entree to the state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

According to WaPo, Michele S. Jones, a retired non commissioned Army officer who was the first female command sergeant major of the Army Reserve and is now a special assistant to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, corresponded by e-mail with the Salahis.

But whether the Jones e-mails offered the Salahis little or great encouragement to get all dressed up and head for the White House is hard to determine from the WaPo story.

A WaPo excerpt:

Sources said the e-mails were sent from Michele S. Jones, the special assistant to the Secretary of Defense and the Pentagon-based liaison to the White House, who lists the Salahis' lawyer, Paul W. Gardner, as one of her 50 friends on the Facebook social networking site.

Several people familiar with the Jones-Salahi correspondence argued the e-mails support the Salahis' case that they were cleared to attend Tuesday night's gala.

 

"There was e-mail correspondence confirming they were legitimately supposed to be there," said Casey Margenau, a close friend of the couple. "They understood they were invited."

"I did not state at any time, or imply that I had tickets for ANY portion of the evening's events," Jones said in a statement released by the White House late Monday. "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. Even though I informed them of this, they still decided to come."

Reached by phone at her office at the Pentagon early in the day and asked about the e-mails, Jones said, "I am not going to say anything at this point at all. Oh, my goodness."

Asked how she knows the Salahis and why she would have tried to get them into the White House, she said, "I am not going to say anything at this point at all. In fact, I am going to terminate the call right now because I am not sure what in the world is going on here."