Found here. Short version: the man was as guilty of sin, and deserved it. But we have to start pulling up these weeds earlier.
Tag: corruption
Kathleen Kane keeps on with keeping Pennsylvania-SEN safe for Pat Toomey.
Here’s a question for the ages:
So if there’s one question that’s come up again and again in the tangled legal surrounding Attorney General Kathleen Kane, it’s this one: Exactly how much lawyering can one do when the state Supreme Court has suspended your license to practice law?
The basic problem for Kathleen Kane here is that right now she can’t actually say anything (including press releases) that implies that she’s a lawyer. Largely because, according to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, she’s not actually one. So now she’s being forced to write out all of her press releases as being from “Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane’s office.” Which is clumsy, sure – but so is stubbornly refusing to resign after you get caught abusing your power. Oops, did I write that out? I must be part of the conspiracy, then.
No, seriously, I have to be part of the Conspiracy.
New Hampshire Governor Maggie “I took illegal PAC contributions!” Hassan (D) to run for Senate.
Possibly you may remember the Northern Pass story from last year: in a nutshell, Maggie Hassan’s campaign took forty-five thousand in illegally same-day campaign contributions from three Big Labor unions (SEIU, UFCW, and IBEW). This was generally considered to be at least suspicious, as all three unions want New Hampshire’s proposed Northern Pass transmission line project to go through, while radical environmentalists of course instead want people in New Hampshire to be cold, hungry, and in the dark. Was it a bribe? Nobody knows! Was it illegal? Well…
After the state Republican Party filed a complaint, Attorney General Joe Foster was tasked with deciding whether the $45,000 in union donations to Hassan’s campaign were legal. He decided that a person becomes a candidate at midnight on the day he or she announces. Under that rather creative interpretation, the two $10,000 donations were legal, but the $25,000 contribution was not.
Further complicating the story, the PACs had not registered in New Hampshire, making their donations felonies. Foster ordered the PACs to register, but did not punish them for the violations, which was very lenient of him.
Rep. Mike Honda (D, CA-17) squirms under allegations he mixed campaign business with House business.
When you do politics, you should always read local newspaper reports whenever possible. They often tell you things that you won’t hear from the national news organizations. Case in point: Mike Honda (D, CA-17). He had a bad week, from a ‘campaign shenanigans’ point of view. This is how The Hill described it:
Shown notes from his district office’s staff retreat, Rep. Michael M. Honda allegedly acknowledged to ethics investigators that what he was seeing was “open to a lot of interpretation, but it doesn’t look good.”
The California Democrat’s former campaign manager presented official staff with a strategy in which district office events would be used to raise money, according to Office of Congressional Ethics documents released Thursday.
Pennsylvania AG Kathleen Kane (D) claims that a conspiracy is behind her recent indictments.
Alternate title: Kathleen crazies a Kane.
That was a fascinating press conference that embattled Democratic Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane had there, yesterday.
You see, everybody who showed up for this press conference thought, rather naively, that AG Kane would be addressing her being charged with “conspiracy, obstruction, oppression, perjury and false swearing” with regard to her involvement in the leak of a 2009 AG probe of a Philadelphia NAACP official. Instead, she decided to make a no-questions-taken, thirteen minute statement where a sitting state Attorney General repeatedly insisted that all of the allegations were due to a conspiracy against her designed to keep AG Kane from ferreting out the truth behind a nefarious, wicked, and NSFW email chain cabal. She then politely begged her children to stand by her and left the room without taking a question.
I AM NOT MAKING ANY OF THIS UP.
Rep. Chaka Fattah (D, PA-02) indicted for all SORTS of political corruption, really.
NAME! THAT! PARTY!!!!!
REP. CHAKA FATTAH INDICTED IN RACKETEERING CASE
…[Five people were] charged today in a 29-count indictment with participating in a racketeering conspiracy and other crimes, including bribery; conspiracy to commit mail, wire and honest services fraud; and multiple counts of mail fraud, falsification of records, bank fraud, making false statements to a financial institution and money laundering, the U.S. Attorney said.
Google News is wrong: Gov. Jay Inslee (D, Washington) was not arrested on abuse of power charges.
Dagnabbit, don’t tease me like this, Google News.
Yeah, it turns out that that they truncated the quote there:
A Washington State Patrol trooper who worked as a bodyguard for Gov. Jay Inslee was arrested in Olympia, accused of destroying evidence connected to his son’s criminal case.
Did NY Assemblyman Sheldon Silver (D) give up NY Senator Dean Skelos (R)?
Dean G. Skelos, the leader of the New York State Senate, and his son are expected to be arrested on federal corruption charges next week, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The expected arrests, coming roughly three months after federal bribery and kickback charges led Assemblyman Sheldon Silver to step down as speaker, would signal an extension of the investigation into allegations of political corruption in Albany, and would almost certainly further upend the legislative session.
Continue reading Did NY Assemblyman Sheldon Silver (D) give up NY Senator Dean Skelos (R)?
Think Progress inadvertently sums why the Clinton Foundation is problematical.
Obviously, they were trying to debunk. The problem is that… well, it’s that the Clinton Foundation is a pretty suspect shop. There’s no way around it.
Also: I harp on Buzzfeed a lot, but it was pretty helpful of Ben Smith to present this in a nice, concise chunk for later dissemination. I didn’t have to do anything except scoop it out of the box, and onto the plate. Thanks, guys!
Intended as a debunking but summarizes some pretty serious allegations re Clinton foundation http://t.co/9PGtENWp58 pic.twitter.com/zCseOLXSBs
— Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) April 21, 2015
I hope that Gov. Bruce Rauner (R, Illinois) knows what a blood oath is…
…because, according to George Will, he just took one*.
[Illinois governor Bruce] Rauner [R] hopes to ban, as some states do, public employees unions from making political contributions, whereby they elect the employers with whom they negotiate their compensation. Rauner notes that an owner of a small firm that does business with Illinois’s government is forbidden to make political contributions. Rauner also hopes to enable counties and local jurisdictions to adopt right-to-work laws, thereby attracting businesses that will locate only where there are such laws.
He hopes the legislature will empower voters to ratify changes to the state constitutional provision that says public pensions can never be “diminished or impaired.” He also proposes shifting state employees from unaffordable defined-benefit plans to a more affordable plan for the state. Furthermore, he hopes to end practices that now have more than 11,000 retirees receiving six-figure pensions.
Continue reading I hope that Gov. Bruce Rauner (R, Illinois) knows what a blood oath is…