Warning: Those of you who consider the past to be irrelevant should stop reading now. Or you can simply read the emphasized text.
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Nancy Pelosi has a problem. An eerily familiar problem, and it starts like this:
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Democrats intend to lead the most honest, the most open and the most ethical Congress in history.
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Nancy Pelosi
Uh-oh. Compare her words to this quote:
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Mine will be the most ethical administration in the history of the republic!
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President-Elect Bill Clinton, November 1992.
A Google search of those words provided an irresistible refresher. [Disclaimer: My personal comments are interspersed with facts and opinions plagiarized from my search.] Less than half an hour after Clinton was sworn in, it was decreed that his top aides would be banned from lobbying any agency of the U.S. government for five years after leaving office. They would be forever barred from lobbying on behalf of any foreign government. He wanted to “send a signal that we are going to change politics as usual.”
At the end of his administration, Clinton revoked his first executive order and lifted the phony ban on the future lobbying activities of his administration’s top officials.
White House mouthpiece Jake Siewert explained, in his usual disingenuous way, that the order was no longer needed because there wasn’t much question of Clinton appointees exerting influence with members of President Bush’s incoming administration.White House Counsel Beth Nolan went further: “The main policies underlying the executive order no longer apply when there is a change of parties at the White House. Because special access is no longer a concern, the special measures contained in the executive order are no longer necessary.”
Got it? The ban existed when there really weren't any former Clinton administration officials. Once there were a ton of them, the ban was lifted. You can't be too vigilant in regard to removing laws that are no longer needed.
Howard Paster, the administration's congressional liaison, promptly walked through the revolving door between public service and private lobbying to emerge as chairman and chief executive of Hill & Knowlton, the same lobbying and PR firm he was with before joining the White House. Word was that his new salary was somewhere in the million-dollar range.
Roy Neel, deputy White House chief of staff, became president of the United States Telephone Association, which coordinates the lobbies of local and regional phone companies. His new job paid $500,000 a year.
There is no shortage of other examples of why Clinton’s first official act was “no longer necessary.”
A short while after this search was done, an e-mail arrived in which it was suggested that, due to the election, Bush, Cheney, and Karl Rove could and should all be impeached. This scenario, and a recaptured memory of host's triumphant post that George W. Bush sent Ken Lay a birthday card (proving without a doubt that Bush actually KNEW Ken Lay) provoked a few comparisons regarding politicians caught red-handed:
Richard Nixon--out in disgrace
Teddy Kennedy--"Liberal Lush, uhh, Lion" of the Senate
Mark Foley--hiding somewhere
Gerry Studds--remained in Congress
Randy Cunningham--in jail
Alcee Hastings--still in office. Much more on this later
The search for the keywords "Clinton" and "most ethical administration" yielded, among other names, White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman, Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell, and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros. Five cabinet probes were instituted. Three were into the financial affairs of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown who had been slated by the president to head his reelection bid. Another was in regard to former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy.
Nothing turned up in regard to any other administration having three cabinet members investigated.
None of this, however, tops the sentencing of the former national security adviser to the President of the United States, Sandy Berger. Berger was fined $50,000 given two years probation and had his security clearance removed for three years after he admitted destroying classified documents related to the Clinton administration's evaluation of the threat of Al Qaeda.
Initially saying his actions were an ''honest mistake,' Berger later pleaded guilty in April to a misdemeanor of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, which contained information relating to terror threats in the United States during the 2000 millennium celebration."
The Washington Post:
"He admitted to stuffing copies of documents in his coat jacket as he left the National Archives and then destroying some at his office and pretending he had never possessed them. Berger had been reviewing the records about the Clinton administration's response to reports of terrorist threats in 2000 as he was preparing to respond to questions from the commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."
At the loud insistence of Democratic members of Congress, Berger and others were given access to these documents in the national archives so that they would have clear recollection of their actions and could testify faithfully to this important commission. Berger used the opportunity to remove documents in his suit (reportedly he stuffed a few in his socks as well), take the documents to his office and his home, destroy some of them and then deny it. Apologists for Berger point out that "no documents were lost” in that there were existing copies of all the documents destroyed. A half-truth. In fact the documents that were destroyed had unique handwritten notes in the margins that because of Mr. Berger's nefarious work will be lost forever to historians.
One can only imagine how damaging those notes had to have been to the Clinton administration, if Berger was willing to outright steal and destroy them.
Now for the reason why history can not be disregarded by the thinking person:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=110906D
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Speaker Pelosi's Impending Intelligence Failure
By J. Peter Pham & Michael I. Krauss 09 Nov 2006
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is in line to make history as the first female Speaker—and second in line of succession for the presidency—when the new Congress convenes in January. As with any election, a wide variety of issues factored into the dynamics of this year's midterms. For us, however, the just-concluded campaign, like every federal election, was fundamentally about national security. The federal government's principal task is providing for the defense of the nation, without which justice, welfare, and all the other blessings of liberty enjoyed inside the various states are, at best, aspirations.
With majority status in the "people's house" comes a share in responsibility for the security of the Republic. This is why we are so concerned about a shadow which darkens presumptive Speaker Pelosi's triumphant morning, a shadow which will only grow longer if she allows it to begin appearing prominently in the media coverage of the global war on terrorism, metastasizing into her first "intelligence failure" even before she takes the gavel from outgoing Speaker Hastert. That is the shadow of Alcee Lamar Hastings, the reelected Democratic Representative from Florida's 23rd District.
Mr. Hastings was, in the outgoing 109th Congress, the second-ranked Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. But the Washington Post's Charles Babington first reported more than a year ago, in a story that has never been denied (indeed, it has been confirmed in the congressman's hometown newspaper, the Miami Herald) that Ms. Pelosi plans to replace the committee's current ranking Democrat, California Representative Jane Harman, with Mr. Hastings, who would be installed as committee chairman when the 110th Congress begins. The move would be a payback to the Congressional Black Caucus, to whose support Pelosi owes her election as Minority Leader and whose members she angered by picking Ms. Harman to be ranking member over Georgia Rep. Sanford Bishop in 2003. The incoming Speaker must also mollify the Black Caucus for having pushed Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson (he of the frozen cash) off the Ways and Means Committee.
We have difficulty accepting that Mr. Hastings has been allowed by Ms. Pelosi to venture anywhere near national security matters, much less onto a field as vital as the Intelligence Committee, which exercises oversight of organizations ranging from Central Intelligence Agency to the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence Department, including the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. That Mr. Hastings is employed by the United States of America, and is not a guest a federal penitentiary, is itself cause for wonder.
Mr. Hastings's own website says this about his pre-Congressional background: "Known to many as 'Judge,' Congressman Hastings has distinguished himself as an attorney, civil rights activist, judge, and now Member of Congress. Appointed by President Carter in 1979, he became the first African-American Federal Judge in the state of Florida, and served in that position for ten years."
What this autobiography omits are the reasons Hastings' judicial tenure, normally a life appointment, was cut short after only a decade. Barely two years into office, "Judge" Hastings accepted a $150,000 bribe in exchange for giving a lenient sentence to two swindlers, then lied in subsequent sworn testimony about the incident. The case involved two brothers, Frank and Thomas Romano, who had been convicted in 1980 on 21 counts of racketeering. Together with attorney William Borders Jr., Hastings, who presided over the Romanos' case, hatched a plot to solicit a bribe from the brothers. In exchange for a $150,000 cash payment to him, Hastings would return some $845,000 of their $1.2 million in seized assets after they served their three-year jail terms.
Taped conversations between Hastings and Borders confirmed that the judge was a party to the plot. Hastings was also criminally prosecuted for bribery, but his accomplice Borders went to prison rather than testify against him. Hastings was acquitted thanks to Borders' silence. Borders was then pardoned by President Clinton, confirming the wisdom of his refusal to testify. In a remarkable display of chutzpah, Borders then applied for reinstatement to the District of Columbia Bar, claiming that Clinton's federal pardon eliminated his local disbarment. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit did not agree, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal. To former D.C. delegate Walter Fauntroy, Borders' case had a spiritual quality to it. "Being pardoned by the president is like being pardoned by Jesus," Fauntroy sermonized. Thankfully, the Supremes evidently disagreed with this "theology."]
"Be assured that I'm going to be a judge for life," Mr. Hastings told reporters in 1983 after his acquittal. But the arguments that swayed a Miami jury did not sway the Congress. The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives impeached Hastings for bribery and perjury by a lopsided vote of 413 to 3. Then the Democrat-controlled Senate convicted him on eight articles of impeachment by well over the required two-thirds majority in 1989. Thus Mr. Hastings became only the sixth judge in the history of our Republic (and only the third in the 20th Century) to be removed by Congress. He was, and is, an utter disgrace to the nation and to the legal profession. Among those voting to impeach him were Ms. Pelosi herself, Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, the Democratic whip who is likely to become the new House majority leader, and Mr. Hastings' fellow African-American Congressman, Michigan's John Conyers, who took pains to deny that race had anything to do with the removal of the bribe-taking jurist.
Article I, section 3, clause 7, of the Constitution reads as follows:
"Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States...."Alas, in its vote convicting and removing Hastings, the Senate neglected to include language barring him from seeking future office. Hastings was promptly elected to Congress in 1992 as the representative of a new, specially-designed majority-black district.
Since shamelessly taking his seat in the very House that overwhelmingly impeached him, Congressman Hastings has not appeared chastened by his scandal-plagued past. Reports circulate that the "Judge" is the subject of speculation about a conflict of interest. At issue this time is the fact that Hastings added to his Congressional payroll one Patricia Williams, described as a "close personal friend" and former attorney. Williams represented the then-judge at his bribery trial and impeachment hearings, but was herself disbarred in June 1992 for misuse of clients' funds. Mr. Hastings is said to owe Mr. Williams substantial lawyer's fees for her services in the eighties—over $500,000 according to some estimates—and some see his decision to make her a staff assistant as a form of debt-settling at the public's expense. Ms. Williams' annual salary as "staff assistant" is reported to be an impressive $129,000. Here are two other publicly reported annual salaries from Mr. Hastings' office which are quite telling: Vanessa Griddine, staff assistant (scheduler), $71,000; Fred Turner, chief of staff: $67,200.
Ms. Griddine must be one heck of a scheduler, as she earns nearly four thousand dollars a year more than Mr. Turner, the Congressman's chief of staff. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) reports that Ms. Griddine, not Mr. Turner, recently accompanied Hastings on a trip to Portugal and Spain—earlier she had traveled with him to Brussels, at a cost to taxpayers of over $14,000. Doubtless her presence is constantly required to help arrange last-minute scheduling.
Meanwhile, the Miami Herald reported this past June that Hastings is one of a dozen chronic absentees in the current Congress—which raises questions about Ms. Griddine's scheduling acumen. The American Policy Center (APC), a conservative group, has called attention to the fact that, in recent years, Hastings has been under investigation for other ethics violations by the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. The APC
reports that Hastings has also been investigated by the Florida Elections Commission and the Federal Election Commission for various charges of impropriety. Political Money Line, a watchdog group that tracks money in national politics, points out that Hastings ranks second among all American lawmakers in the number of taxpayer-funded trips he has taken since 1994, at a price tag of over $152,000 (not counting expenses incurred by his accompanying "assistants"). Many of those trips were taken on behalf of the OSCE to "monitor elections." The irony of one of Congress's most corrupt members being tasked to monitor electoral fraud should presumably shock even Hastings' original nominator, election supervisor par excellence Jimmy Carter.
Back to the present. The disgraced judge-cum-legislator's record on national security—the most basic criterion for leading the intelligence committee at any time, much less in the midst of a war on terror—has not been reassuring. In the 109th Congress alone, Mr. Hastings voted consistently against key counterterrorism tools, including the Electronic Surveillance Modernization Act, the Intelligence and Law Enforcement Resolution, and the USA PATRIOT and Terrorism Prevention Reauthorization Act. He has been an
opponent of the trial by military commissions of unlawful terrorist combatants as well as border control, NSA communications intercepts, and terrorist financing tracking measures.
Mr. Hastings' dubious record contrasts greatly with that of the centrist Ms. Harman. While highly critical at times of the Bush administration's conduct of intelligence and counterterrorism operations, Ms. Harman has displayed a keen understanding of intelligence issues, and has introduced quite sensible legislation on national security concerns, including government-wide security clearances and enhanced seaport security.
With the serious international security challenges faced by Americans, the last thing we need is more bitter partisanship. Nancy Pelosi is set to make history as our first female Speaker. But what history will record of her speakership, should she choose to vault Mr. Hastings over Ms. Harman, is that her legacy had precious little to do with providing for the common defense of the Republic, and too much to do with shameless pandering.
J. Peter Pham is director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison
University. Michael I. Krauss is professor of law at George Mason University School of Law. Both are adjunct fellows of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
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Of course, some who frequent this forum will say that anything Clinton did (or didn't do) is irrelevant. In two more years, will Bush, Cheney, and Rove receive the same largesse?
Furthermore, should Pelosi appoint Hastings? Is his record, like Clinton's immaterial? Does the past perfomance of Democratic administrations give you confidence that the Democrats will clean up Congress in the next two years?
Be prepared: For every comment along the lines of "Well, so what? Your guy is worse!" I will remind you that Hasting is considered for a CURRENT position. I will also post quotes from ratbastid and shakran that seem to make them uncomfortable at times. Including my personal favorite,
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Originally Posted by ratbastid 2/18/2006
I'd LOVE to see some actual argumentation around here. But as long as certain factions keep themselves safely on the "Oh yeah, well you!" card, there's zero chance of that.
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