LobbyGate

Are Members of Congress (and Maybe Even the President) Being Blackmailed?

dlindorff — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 17:31:21 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the
elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of
liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of
challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution
wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney administration.

There has been speculation on both the far left and the far right,
and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political
spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been
blackmailing at least the key members of the Congressional leadership,
most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National
Security Agency (NSA).

I’ll admit that I considered the idea of blackmail a bit far out.
But now suddenly there is at least some evidence that such seemingly
wild speculation may not have been off the mark, with reports that the
NSA was indeed monitoring Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), and that the Bush
Administration used the evidence it had obtained of her improper
conversations with and promises to assist agents of the Israeli
government and its lobby here in the US, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to blackmail her into supporting the NSA’s
warrantless spying program—the very kind of spying that led to her
being caught on tape plotting with an agent of a foreign power.

At the time of the taping of Harman’s incriminating phone
conversations, the administration was trying desperately (and
ultimately successfully) to get the New York Times to hold
off on publishing a shocking investigative report by journalist James
Risen about a massive campaign of warrantless tapping of Americans’
phone and internet communications.

According to a report by Jeff Stein, published in the latest issue of Congressional Quarterly,
the NSA in 2006 recorded Rep. Harman negotiating with an alleged
Israeli agent about helping Israel win a reduction in the espionage
charges filed by the US in 2005 against two members of the AIPAC lobby
accused of providing US intelligence information to the Israeli
government (the case against AIPAC’s Stephen Rosen and Keith Weissman
is still waiting to go to trial). According to the transcript, a copy
of which was obtained by CQ, the Israeli agent offered to
have AIPAC lobby, and more specifically to have a it arrange for a
wealthy Jewish pro-Israel donor in California donate money to Rep.
Nancy Pelosi, in order to get her, once she became House Speaker, to
name Harman as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. At the end of
the phone conversation, Rep. Harman, who offered to help, was heard to
say, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”

According to reports in CQ and in the New York Times,
which ran a story on the scandal as its lead news item on Tuesday, then
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales subsequently intervened with the FBI
to prevent any prosecution of Harman, a key member of Congress on whom
the administration was relying to help it persuade the Times to withhold its NSA wiretapping exposé until after the 2006 election. In the event, Rep. Harman did later make calls to a Times, editor, the paper did hold its story until after the election, and Harman later was a leading backer of the administration’s controversial (and, according to a federal district judge, illegal) NSA spying program.

There are several serious issues here. One is the extraordinary
glimpse it offers into the extent to which Israel has penetrated the
centers of power in Washington. It is illegal for foreign governments
to directly lobby and to offer to arrange financial contributions for
members of the US government, but here, clearly, Israeli agents were
doing just that. The role of AIPAC as a front for the Israeli
government in Washington, as exposed here, is simply stomach-turning,
and should make it a toxic organization to politicians. Instead, they
flock enmasse to its annual meetings, as President Obama did almost
immediately upon winning the November election, and a large proportion
of both houses from both parties happily accept its campaign largesse.

A second, even bigger, issue is the NSA’s spying activities
themselves. According to CQ, the particular wiretap that caught Rep.
Harman inflagrante with an Israeli agent was a court-approved tap—part
of an investigation into Israeli government spying activities. But even
if this is true—and at this point, we’re relying on what the government
is telling us about it—it shows how dangerous the broader unwarranted
monitoring program of the NSA has been, and remains. Back in 1978,
Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA) in
direct response to the disclosure during the Watergate hearings and
subsequent investigations that the Nixon Administration had been using
the NSA to conduct illegal monitoring of the communications of anti-war
activists, and of members of Congress. To prevent such
police-state outrages in the future, Congress passed the FISA
legislation, establishing a secret court staffed by a panel of
top-security-cleared federal judges, whose sole responsibility was to
consider and grant requests from the NSA for warrants to conduct secret
electronic surveillance within the US or involving American citizens
abroad.

President Bush used the pretext of the 9-11 attacks to secretly
order the NSA to begin a massive compaign of surveillance without going
through the FISA Court for warrants, even secretly soliciting the
cooperation of the nation’s several telecom companies in splicing in
routers at their switching hubs to make it possible to monitor all
conversations moving across the wires and the internet. It seemed to
some observers, myself included, that the only reason the
administration could have had for bypassing the FISA court (which over
30 years of operation has been incredibly accommodating of government
spying requests) was that it was planning to engage in spying that
would outrage the public and the Congress and even the FISA judges. It
also seemed likely, given the Bush/Cheney administration’s public
stance that everyone was either “with us or against us,” and that
critics of the administration’s “War on Terror” or of its plans to
invade Iraq, were “unpatriotic” or “soft on terror,” that congressional
opponents of the administration would be obvious—and indeed
irresistible--targets of that surveillance.

Now that we have seen proof that the administration was not above
using its NSA-acquired knowledge to pressure a member of Congress, it
becomes absolutely essential that Congress and the Justice Department
investigate to see whether other members of Congress were also victims
of agency spying, and whether others besides Rep. Harmon were similarly
extorted or otherwise compromised.

The American public can, at this point, have zero confidence in the
integrity of the Congress or of their own representatives, knowing that
politicians and government officials may be acting not in the public
interest but rather under duress in the interest of those who control
the National Security Agency. We can have zero confidence either in the
integrity of the president, who likewise may well have been compromised
by NSA surveillance conducted on him before he became president.

The only possible position for the public to adopt as of today is to be suspicious of any politician who opposes a full and public investigation
into the NSA’s seven-year-long campaign of sweeping, warrantless
electronic eavesdropping, since opposition to such an investigation, in
the wake of the Harman episode, could well be an indication that the
political figure in question is afraid she or he has been monitored, or
worse, that she or he has been threatened by those who have the
records. Every citizen concerned about the fate of American democracy
should demand that his or her senators and representative promptly call
for such a public probe.

It is no longer a wild idea at all to imagine that our Congress has
been reduced to the status of a Potemkin legislature because of real or
imagined spying by the NSA.

_____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

McCain and the Lobbyist--Missing the Story of the Miss

dlindorff — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 10:43:27 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

All the attention in the breaking story about John McCain's 2000 relationship with a blonde young telecom lobbyist has been focussed on the question of whether or not they were "doing it."

As George Stephanopoulos claimed on ABC, the importance of the story depends upon whether McCain is shown to have had a "relationship" with the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman.

But really, who cares whether they were shacking up on the campaign trail? McCain, after all, already double-timed his starter wife and dumped her for a trophy wife, the statuesque and wealthy beer industry heiress Cindy Hensley, so it's not as though he is campaigning on a strong pro-family platform.

No, the reason his aides, back in 1998-2000, started working behind the scenes to keep Iseman away from McCain, and confronted McCain over his dalliances was because McCain, who had a history of corruption, most notably his card-carrying membership in the Keating Five savings and loan scandal, couldn't afford to appear to be backsliding.

It isn't, that is to say, a matter of whether or not McCain was diddling Vicki. It's whether he was delivering for her and her clients, perhaps in return for her delivering for him.

As the New York Times reported in its investigative story on the McCain/Iseman liason, published February 21, the media were reporting back in 2000 on how McCain had been writing letters on behalf of some of Iseman's telecom clients.

The Times article reports that McCain wrote letters in 1998 and 1999 to the Federal Communications Commission urging it to uphold marketing agreements that would allow TV companies like Glencairn Ltd., an Iseman client, to control two stations in the same city. The paper says the senator also introduced a measure in the Senate that would create tax incentives for minority ownership of stations, a measure sought by Iseman on behalf of several media clients. McCain also on two occasions reportedly pushed legislation that would permit a company to control television stations in overlapping markets. That was a measure being sought by Paxson (now Ion Media Networks), yet another Iseman client.

The Times reports that in 1999, Iseman asked Mr. McCain's staff to send a letter to the FCC seeking approval of a television deal being sought by Paxon. McCain sent that letter, and a second one--a level of interference which led to a rebuke from the then FCC chairman.

So what's the story here? Is it whether Sen. McCain is an adulterer? Or is it whether he is a rank hypocrite posing as a Mr. Clean Government?

The problem may be that what McCain was doing shilling for the telecom industry is not illegal, and is not uncommon. In fact, it's what our legislators do. Virtually all of them. The only thing different about McCain is that he claims he doesn't do that, at least not since he saw the light when he nearly went to jail for it, or at least had a near political death experience after hitching his nascent congressional career to a corrupt banker's wagon.

Meanwhile, we see once again what a wussy newspaper the New York Times is, at least where investigative stories about the Right are concerned. Once again, we learn, this time from the New Republic, that the Times and its executive editor, Bill Keller, held, this time for over two months, a political story that the public had a need and right to know about during a critical election campaign. How different might the presidential campaign look now if the Times had run its story in December, when it was ready to go, well ahead of the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, instead of now when McCain has the Republican nomination all but sewn up?

This kind of dithering and backpedaling and censorship by Keller, which reportedly followed intense lobbying and threats by McCain and his campaign, recalls Keller's holding (for a year, and until after the 2006 Congressional election!) of a reporter's story about the National Security Agency's illegal warrantless spying program, and his holding and ultimately killing of an already typeset story (a week before the 2004 presidential election) about the remote cueing device on President George Bush's back and in his ear during the 2004 presidential debates.
(See my story on this in FAIR's Extra magazine and in Mother Jones magazine.)

We are left to wonder, what other great stories is Keller hiding from us, perhaps until after Election Day this November?
_______________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is also found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

George and Jack

davidswanson — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 23:30:33 -0500

From CREW

Meet the New Part-Time RNC Chair - Senator Mel Martinez (Repugnant-FL)

CactusPat — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 06:44:10 -0500

It's official, Kenny (BoyToy) Mehlman's replacement has been anointed by our Dear Smirkin' MisLeader. Mel (Empty-Suit) Martinez is the new partime RNC Chair. He of the infamous Terry Schiavo memo. And, yes, another Lobbygate - Bob Ney - Jack Abramoff tainted Republican. Oh, and he's also caught up in a little campaign finance scandal of his own involving corporate embezzlers in S. Fl. But I'm sure that's someone else's fault.... Great choice Smirky! I'm enjoying the hell out of watching you flush your Repugnant crime syndicate down the ol' swirly slip and slide...

Bush Announces Sen. Martinez Next RNC Chairman
Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), a close WH ally and a Cuban American, will take the job of general chairman of the RNC, Bush announced to reporters at the WH this afternoon. The appointment comes in the wake of an election that yielded shrinking GOP support from Hispanic voters. Martinez, a first-term senator, will remain in office and serve as the party's chief spokesman and fundraiser heading into the 2008 elections. Mike Duncan, the RNC's current general counsel and a former party treasurer, will manage day-to-day operations and be elected chairman in January, Bush said. The current co-chair, Jo Ann Davidson, will continue in that post... (more)

Counsel to GOP Senator Wrote Memo On Schiavo Martinez Aide Who Cited Upside For Party Resigns
The legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) admitted yesterday that he was the author of a memo citing the political advantage to Republicans of intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, the senator said in an interview last night. Brian H. Darling, 39, a former lobbyist for the Alexander Strategy Group on gun rights and other issues, offered his resignation and it was immediately accepted, Martinez said. Martinez, the GOP's Senate point man on the issue, said he earlier had been assured by aides that his office had nothing to do with producing the memo. "I never did an investigation, as such," he said. "I just took it for granted that we wouldn't be that stupid. It was never my intention to in any way politicize this issue."

Martinez, a freshman who was secretary of housing and urban development for most of President Bush's first term, said he had not read the one-page memo. He said he inadvertently passed it to Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who had worked with him on the issue. After that, officials gave the memo to reporters for ABC News and The Washington Post. Harkin said in an interview that Martinez handed him the memo on the Senate floor, in hopes of gaining his support for the bill giving federal courts jurisdiction in the Florida case in an effort to restore the brain-damaged Florida woman's feeding tube. "He said these were talking points -- something that we're working on here," Harkin said...

The bonus of this flawed selection is that it has the base (AL Qaida, pun intended) in an uproar. Seems he's soft on them criminal illegal immigrant types. A kos blogger has posted a few gems gleamed from various flying monkey blogs, or you can read what they are howlin' 'bout here and here.

Added bonus, AmeicaBlog points out that while he puts on an anti-gay homohysterical public face, he has no propblem whith gay republican staffers....

GOP Scandal Watch: 10/11/06

Bob Fertik — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 10:50:41 -0400

Just 28 days to Election Day - how many GOP scandals can we count today?

Wayne Madsen compiled a beautiful state-by-state GOP Scandal Scorecard - send it to your friends!

Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) will plead guilty on Friday the 13th for his Abramoff bribes and go directly to jail - but he will pass Go! and he will collect ~~$200~~ $165,200! And to make matters worse, he will still collect his full Congressional pension for the rest of his life!! (CREW)

Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA) insists he never was lobbied by Abramoff. But new documents from the Northern Mariana Islands show Abramoff lobbied Pombo personally.(CREW)

Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) visited Pages outside their dorm in 2000 and 2002-3, forcing the Page supervisor to intervene. (ABC)

Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) said today he did not read the sexual emails from Mark Foley to a page and did not confront Foley personally. But two days ago, Kolbe's spokesperson said he did read those emails and did confront Foley personally. (John Aravosis)

Sen. Mike Dewine (R-OH) is under investigation by the Army for illegally using a uniformed soldier in his campaign ad. (Greg Sargent)

Rep. Charles Taylor (R-NC) has used earmarks to directly benefit his own companies. (CREW/Wall Street Journal)

Abramoff Scandal Reaches Into the WH, Claims Rove's Top Aide

CactusPat — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 17:11:29 -0400

It was bound to happen sooner or later. Fortuitous that it comes before the election...

Rove Aide Linked To Abramoff Resigns
A top aide to WH strategist Karl Rove resigned yesterday after disclosures that she accepted gifts from and passed information to now-convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, becoming the first official in the West Wing to lose a job in the influence-peddling scandal. Susan B. Ralston submitted her resignation to avoid causing political damage to pResident Bush a month before the midterm elections, officials said. "She did not want to be a distraction to the WH at this important time," said WH spokeswoman Dana Perino... (No distraction at all, yeah right!)

A congressional report showed last week that Ralston accepted sometimes-pricey tickets to nine sports and entertainment events from Abramoff while she provided him with inside White House information. The bipartisan report said there is no evidence that Rove knew of or approved of Ralston's actions, and sources said yesterday that the White House was surprised by the report's revelations. The WH counsel's office conducted a review of the report, but with Ralston's departure it closed its inquiry yesterday. "Nothing more will come from the report, no further fallout from the report," Perino said....

-------------------

...The sprawling Abramoff investigations have triggered prosecutions on Capitol Hill and on K Street, but Ralston's resignation brought the scandal into the White House proper. The only other White House official caught up in the probe has been David H. Safavian, the procurement chief for the Office of Management and Budget, who was convicted in June of lying about his ties to Abramoff. As right hand to the president's most important adviser, Ralston was closer to the center of the Bush operation. She was a key organizer of presidential events, coordinating with White House political, scheduling, advance and public liaison offices. "She will be missed because she solves problems, and finding people in government who solve problems" is rare, a colleague said.

Ralston, who earned $122,000 a year, had been a minor player in the scandal for more than a year, but it was not until her e-mails with the lobbyist were released by the House Government Reform Committee last week that her role became known...

--------------------

As a former Abramoff assistant, Ralston played intermediary between the lobbyist and Rove. The congressional report found 66 Abramoff contacts with the White House, more than half of them with Ralston. In addition, Abramoff's lobbying colleagues contacted Ralston 69 times. On Oct. 21, 2001, Ralston e-mailed Abramoff that Rove had read an Abramoff memo about a political endorsement in the Mariana Islands governor's race, a little-noticed election but one important to Abramoff because he had lucrative clients there. Ralston reported to Abramoff that Rove had agreed, writing the next day: "You win :)."...

more WaPo...

Read the full report at the House Reform Committee Minoirty Office

BOB NEY CUTS AND RUNS!

mikekohr — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 22:29:37 -0400

Another rotten Republican piece of fruit falls from the tree of corruption.

Jack Abramoff's "golf buddy," pudgy Bob Ney, ® OH, has announced that he will not be running for re-election. Predictably Ney, claims he is cutting and running, for the sake of his family.

read article:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/080706J.shtml

2591 soldiers KIA
18,777 maimed and wounded
+44,191 Iraqi dead
Reject the culture of death! Embrace hope, vote Democratic!

mike kohr

Goss Quits As Hookergate Explodes

Bob Fertik — Fri, 05 May 2006 17:39:36 -0400

CIA Director Porter Goss quit so suddenly today that it even shocked FOX and Bill Kristol.

If you haven't been following Hookergate, now's the time to catch up. Here's the nutshell from ThinkProgress:

For more than a decade, Cunningham-linked defense contractor Brent Wilkes curried favor with lawmakers and CIA officials by hosting weekly parties at lavish hospitality suites at the Watergate and Westin hotels in Washington. Guests would gamble, socialize, and sometimes receive prostitutes; according to Harper’s magazine, the festivities “began early with poker games and degenerated” into what one source described “as a ‘frat party’ scene — real bacchanals.”

The highest-ranking CIA official to admit he attended the poker parties thrown by Wilkes is Executive Director Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, the agency’s third-ranking official. (Foggo even “occasionally hosted the poker parties at his house in northern Virginia,” though he denies ever seeing prostitutes at the gatherings.) Foggo’s connections to Wilkes and fellow contractor Mitchell Wade are now the focus of an investigation into CIA contracts by the agency’s inspector general, first made public in March...

Last week, Harper’s magazine reported that party-goers “under intense scrutiny by the FBI are current and former lawmakers on Defense and Intelligence committees — including one person who now holds a powerful intelligence post.” CIA Director Porter Goss is perhaps the only individual who fits such a description. (Goss denied the accusations through a spokesperson.) But the alleged links between Goss, Foggo, and Wilkes led some to return to questions raised when Goss initially selected Foggo to be executive director in November 2004.

TPMMucker.com is blogging all the details.

So why exactly did Goss quit?

Justin Rood says "Goss was told to fire Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, his troublesome Executive Director, and Goss refused." That seems plausible, but it's just the tip of the iceberg if any of the Hookergate rumors are true.

Josh Marshall describes the broader picture:

The hookers in Hookergate are, of course, the sizzle. But there's a bigger story. It stems directly from the Randy "Duke" Cunningham bribery scandal, which many had figured was over. But it's not. You may have noticed that while Duke Cunningham is already in jail and Mitchell Wade has already pled guilty to multiple charges, Brent Wilkes has never been touched. Wilkes is the ur-briber at the heart of the Cunningham scandal, you can see pretty clearly by reading the other indictments and plea agreements. Wade was Wilkes' protege.

Now, on the surface one might surmise that the prosecutors are just taking their time, putting together their best case.

I hear different.

Wilkes has deep ties into the CIA. The focal point of those ties is to Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the man Porter Goss appointed to the #3 position at CIA when he took over the Agency last year. Remember, Wilkes' scam was getting corrupt contracts deep in the 'black' world of intelligence and defense appropriations, where there's little or no oversight. Foggo was in the contracting and procurement field at the CIA. So you can see how he and Wilkes, who have been friends since high school, had plenty to talk about.

The CIA wasn't the only place Wilkes and his protege Wade plied their corrupt trade. There were also in the mix contracting on the Bush Pentagon's extra-constitutional spying operations. And I am told that senior appointees at the DOD knew about their corruption but overlooked it.

Now, since the Cunningham scandal got under, and particularly of late, there's been a big tug of war between federal law enforcement and the CIA over whether to really go after Wilkes. Probably a little more specificity is in order there, folks at CIA in the orbit of Foggo and presumably Goss.

Now, how does Goss know Foggo?

That's how we get into the other part of this story -- those 'hospitality suites', that moveable feast of food, poker and love, Brent Wilkes ran in Washington for maybe fifteen years. We hear that's how Goss got to be friends with Foggo, whom he later promoted to executive director of the CIA, the number 3 post at the Agency.

Now, last week, Goss denied he had attended any of Wilkes' parties, in answer to a question from TPMmuckraker. Foggo admitted attending the parties but claimed he'd never seen the hookers.

Now, corrupt contractors saucing up Agency officials and members of Congress to get contracts and free money. Hospitality suites where the saucing takes place. Hookers in the mix. It's going on for more than a decade, various members of the key committees in the mix. Goss, former member of one of those committees, appoints one of the key players in all this mess as the number three guy at CIA? The feds leaning hard on the limo company owner who probably knows all the details and already has a long rap sheet and can't afford another conviction?

There's a lot going on here, a lot we don't know, what's connected and what's coincidence. But this is the backstory. And why this story is likely to turn out to be a very big deal.

The Fall of DeLay is a Shot of Hope

Ted Kahl — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 16:09:58 -0400

Once upon a time, I never imagined that the "most powerful man in Washington," as he was often called, would resign in disgrace. Remember, it was DeLay who strong-armed the impeachment of Clinton, even after the GOP lost 5 seats. For over seven years I have invested my entire life in opposing the hegemony of the Right Wing. Back in 1999, the Right was poised to control all three branches of government, and I believed that once that happened, there would be no turning back. And then with a little help from Katherine Harris, Jeb's pals, DeLay's Gucci riot squad -- and the Felonious Five on the Supreme Court -- the Right did control all three branches.

But then there was Jefford's courageous move that gave the Senate to the Democrats. That revived my hopes that there could be a check on the Right's power. In the run-up to the 2002 election, I still had the passion -- which I expressed through activism on the internet and in my local area. I so wanted the Dems to strengthen control of the Senate, and regain the House.

Unfortunately, the Dems fumbled that opportunity, right from the point when Jeffords gave them the Senate. Where were the investigations? Why weren't the Dems using the bully pulpit to expose Enron's influence of Bush's energy policy, Bush's failures around 9/11 -- and so much more??? Why were they still rubber stamping damn near everything Bush and the GOP wanted -- all those egregious bills and nominations???

Oh, the Dems wanted to work "in a spirit of bi-partisanship", to "raise the tone in Washington." They were parroting the very phrases that Rove & Co. had crafted to cow the Dems into submission. With the Democrats, it was like -- "oh if we're nice, you won't hurt us will you?" But Bush and the GOP just saw it as weakness, and kept beating the crap out of them. The Dems were suckers and in some cases, maybe worse...

And after the 2002 defeats, there was one discouraging episode after another -- through the 2004 (s)election, and the seemingly daily reports of the Dems caving in -- with the Alito nomination, and most recently on the Patriot Act. But now the mighty DeLay has fallen! Suddenly, I feel some hope that the tide can still be turned against Bush and the Right Wing. What will happen with the Limbaugh case? Will Fitzgerald pursue Libby's co-conspirators? What's more -- DeLay was faced with the very real prospect that he would lose the election. Does that mean that some elections still cannot be rigged, such as in DeLay's district? So it hasn't all been in vain... Jackson Thoreau can certainly attest to that.

In 2003, I organized a petition drive to oust Tom DeLay from office and presented copies of the petition signed by several thousand fellow Americans to the offices of Rep. Joel Hefley, former chairman of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, and Rep. Alan B. Mollohan, who is still ranking minority member of that committee.

The grounds I used were for misconduct and violation of House rules, especially the first rule of the House Code of Ethics, which states, "A member, officer, or employee of the House of Representatives shall conduct himself at all times in a manner which shall reflect creditably on the House of Representatives."

At the same time, Public Citizen and other groups and individuals contacted the same committee with similar requests. We couldn't file official ethics complaints because House leaders had passed rules years before stopping individual groups and citizens from doing so. Only members of Congress could file a formal complaint, and they rarely did.

So our efforts didn't immediately start an investigation on DeLay, and they were never really acknowledged by the House committee. But I believe they helped lead to an environment in which officials started questioning DeLay's abuses more and gave the committee some support to go after DeLay.

"Electric Politics" Interview with Robert Bryce, author of "Cronies"

Ted Kahl — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 22:45:09 -0400

In the wake of Tom DeLay's impending resignation, here's an interesting conversation with an expert on the Texas money machine...

Former State Dept. official George Keeney interviews Robert Bryce, author of "Cronies." Also, check out the other interviews, especially one of former NSA Director William Odom -- to hear his criticism of the Bush administration and the Iraq War.

Although he was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Robert Bryce makes his home in Texas. He's put a lot of work into following the Texas money network, which he probably understands as well as anyone who's not a big time insider. In addition to two books, which look at that network from different perspectives, including its impact on the world outside Texas, he's written widely on a number of issues. In this conversation we talk about his recent trip to Saudi Arabia and Dubai, about oil supply, about the Palestinians, American politics, and raising bees. This podcast runs about 45 minutes.