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Originally Posted by willravel
The on going "deck stacking" is blatent in it's intent and frightening in it's implications. At what point does the POTUS finally become untouchable? Bush has managed to squeek by misleading congress, bypassing FISA and spying on his own people, and a thousand other things, and it is still ongoing.
Did I just miss behavior like this from Clinton, Bush 1, and Reagan, or is this a new low?
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C'mon, Will....they alllll do it....slick Willie.....blah blah blah.....
...seriously, though....I'm as "up to speed", following the minutiae of it, as I have since the beginning, and if I don't know all of the specifics of the Cunningham/Abramoff/Wade/Ney (convicted so far....) Delay (indicted, and prosecutor Ronnie Earl has issued subpoenas related to this, also.....) Wilkes/Foggo (about to be indicted), and Lewis, Harris, Ed Buckham, and probably Goss, still under investigation.....what member of the public, does?
(I've documented the "roles" and associations to this, of the names above, this morning on the "Porter Goss" thread....)
The Cunningham investigation began only because a San Diego reporter matched a Washington DC address of a Corp. set up by Mitchell Wade to buy Cunningham's house, with Wade himself, and wrote a story about it.
Fired US Attorney Carol Lam has not been a zealous prosecutor, even though it appears that Wade and Wilkes and Cunningham were on the radar screen of her predecessor as far back as in 2000. She is however, in charge of this complicated mess, and the move to remove her cannot aid in moving along the investigation, especially since she is now reported to be committed to indicting Wilkes and Foggo before she leaves. The "tell" will be who is appointed to replace her.....here is another tangent of this investigation, to provide an additional glimpse of it's depth.
Quote:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/008894.php
(June 30, 2006 -- 11:55 AM EDT)
So do we have a preview now of where the investigation into House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-CA) is going?
As we've discussed before, Lewis and at least two of his former staffers -- <a href="http://tpmmuckraker.com/shockey.php">Jeffrey Shockey</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/03/washington/03white.html?ei=5090&en=8028e0b0e0e4445b&ex=1306987200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print">Letitia White</a> -- are now targets of the expanded Cunningham investigation. The investigation appears to center on Lewis and the two staffers' interconnected ties to the lobby shop of Copeland Lowery. Lewis has longstanding ties to Copeland Lowery honcho, Bill Lowery, as Copley's Jerry Kammer <a href="http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/20051223-9999-lz1n23lewis.html">explained last December.</a> Shockey and White left Lewis' employ to go to work for Copeland Lowery. White, you'll remember, among other things, bought the Capitol Hill house with one of the big earmark cronies and then rented the House to the PAC she set up, which is <a href="http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/000838.php">run by Lewis' step-daughter.</a>
Anyway, it's a complicated world in Lewisland. But bear with me.
This isn't an investigation into Lewis' various staffers. This is an investigation of Lewis. The probes into the staffers are means to that end. And given the nature of these investigations, where alleged criminal acts are extremely difficult to prove without a cooperating witness, they need someone to flip on Lewis.
And here's where the significance of <a href="http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/001029.php">yesterday's story</a> by Justin Rood comes in. As Justin and the TPMmuckraker staff showed by analyzing Copeland Lowery's flurry of lobby fee restatements earlier this year, the folks at Copeland appear to be in serious legal jeopardy.
In the Abramoff case, prosecutors have been rolling up cooperating witnesses by charging with statutes that are seldom enforced. But legal experts told us that given the systematic nature of the failure to report lobbying work that shows up in the Copeland papers, prosecution seems likely even setting aside the desire to get folks to flip on higher-ups. And Lowery, Shockey and White are each on the line for those failures to report.
So Copeland Lowery's problems are Jerry Lewis' problems. And Copeland Lowery has a lot of problems.
-- Josh Marshall
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....by the way, Justin Rood, the reporter who has investigated much of what became the content in the preceding quote box, is profiled here:
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2007/01...y2333036.shtml
....that damn "liberal media"....they've rewarded Justin Rood for his unfounded (not) smearing of politically connected traitors, by giving him a new job at ABC news investigative unit and blog, "the blotter":
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/arc..._21.php#012059