GOP's Ed Rollins: Hookergate is "Big"
By Justin Rood - May 3, 2006, 10:15 PM
TMP MuckrakerGOP super-strategist Ed Rollins (late of the Katherine Harris campaign) made a couple interesting comments on Charlie Rose last night. First, he indicated strongly that he believes a number of the other lawmakers in trouble with Hookergate are Defense appropriators. He also says as many as 15 lawmakers could get indicted over the mess in the next few months.
Maybe Ed's playing the expectations game: if voters buy the 15 number, and only seven actually get busted, well then the kids aren't so bad after all. Still, it's interesting speculation from an insider. I just found the show transcript on Nexis -- emphasis is mine:
ED ROLLINS. . . If this House scandal is as big as I think it is from talking to people that are around it -- of course it started with Cunningham and it`s moving beyond that.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Duke Cunningham.
..........
ED ROLLINS: The use of pros utes and what`s occurred in Washington that I think everyone`s disgusted at, is we promised we were going to be different than the Democrats; we weren`t going to basically be beholden to K Street, we were going to be term limits and we weren`t going to be the big PACs and all the rest of it. That`s all gone by the boards, and if anything we may even be worse.
In order to be a chairman of a committee today, you have to go raise millions and millions of dollars to be able to dole out. Not that there`s compe ive races, but that`s part of the process. So we have -- let me just finish. We have created a culture in which a whole bunch of people have taken a whole bunch of money, and now that you`ve earmarked this stuff -- if you end up with eight or nine or as many as 15 members of Congress, even a couple Democrats, getting indicted in the next three or four months, that may be sufficient.
Well this explains Cal Thomas turning his back on the GOP is his column in the local fish-wrap today.
I hope they find and prosecute every criminal Congressman on the Hill; regardless of party affiliation.
I think the big difference here is that Janet Reno is no longer Attorney General and you have a Justice Department willing to investigate and a majority willing to weed out their rotten apples and a White House that won't stand in the way of that.
But, we'll see how it all washes out...
Speaking of corruption, how 'bout the leading Democrat on the Ethics Committee? Ooops.
I'm sure WH/Gonzalez will put much more effort into this project of silencing the press than it will into Congresspeople using s.
April 30, 2006
In Leak Cases, New Pressure on Journalists
By ADAM LIPTAK
Earlier administrations have fired and prosecuted government officials who provided classified information to the press. They have also tried to force reporters to identify their sources.
But the Bush administration is exploring a more radical measure to protect information it says is vital to national security: the criminal prosecution of reporters under the espionage laws.
Such an approach would signal a thorough revision of the informal rules of engagement that have governed the relationship between the press and the government for many decades. Leaking in Washington is commonplace and typically entails tolerable risks for government officials and, at worst, the possibility of subpoenas to journalists seeking the iden ies of sources.
But the Bush administration is putting pressure on the press as never before, and it is operating in a judicial climate that seems increasingly receptive to constraints on journalists.
In the last year alone, a reporter for The New York Times was jailed for refusing to testify about a confidential source; her source, a White House aide, was prosecuted on charges that he lied about his contacts with reporters; a C.I.A. analyst was dismissed for unauthorized contacts with reporters; and a raft of subpoenas to reporters were largely upheld by the courts.
It is not easy to gauge whether the administration will move beyond these efforts to criminal prosecutions of reporters. In public statements and court papers, administration officials have said the law allows such prosecutions and that they will use their prosecutorial discretion in this area judiciously. But there is no indication that a decision to begin such a prosecution has been made. A Justice Department spokeswoman, Tasia Scolinos, declined to comment on Friday.
Because such prosecutions of reporters are unknown, they are widely thought inconceivable. But legal experts say that existing laws may well allow holding the press to account criminally. Should the administration pursue the matter, these experts say, it could gain a tool that would thoroughly alter the balance of power between the government and the press.
The administration and its allies say that all avenues must be explored to ensure that vital national security information does not fall into the hands of the nation's enemies.
In February, Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales whether the government's investigation into The Times's disclosure of a National Security Agency eavesdropping program included "any potential violation for publishing that information."
Mr. Gonzales responded: "Obviously, our prosecutors are going to look to see all the laws that have been violated. And if the evidence is there, they're going to prosecute those violations."
Recent articles in conservative opinion magazines have been even more forceful.
"The press can and should be held to account for publishing military secrets in wartime," Gabriel Schoenfeld wrote in Commentary magazine last month.
Surprising Move by F.B.I.
One example of the administration's new approach is the F.B.I.'s recent effort to reclaim classified do ents in the files of the late columnist Jack Anderson, a move that legal experts say was surprising if not unheard of.
"Under the law," Bill Carter, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said earlier this month, "no private person may possess classified do ents that were illegally provided to them."
Critics of the administration position say that altering the conventional understanding between the press and government could have dire consequences.
"Once you make the press the defendant rather than the leaker," said David Rudenstine, the dean of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York and a First Amendment scholar, "you really shut down the flow of information because the government will always know who the defendant is."
The administration's position draws support from an unlikely source * the 1971 Supreme Court decision that refused to block publication by The Times and The Washington Post of the classified history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers. The case is generally considered a triumph for the press. But two of the justices in the 6-to-3 majority indicated that there was a basis for after-the-fact prosecution of the newspapers that published the papers under the espionage laws.
Reading of Espionage Laws
Both critics and allies of the administration say that the espionage laws on their face may well be read to forbid possession and publication of classified information by the press. Two provisions are at the heart of the recent debates.
The first, enacted in 1917, is, according to a 2002 report by Susan Buckley, a lawyer who often represents news organizations, "at first blush, pretty much one of the scariest statutes around."
It prohibits anyone with unauthorized access to do ents or information concerning the national defense from telling others. The wording of the law is loose, but it seems to contain a further requirement for spoken information. Repeating such information is only a crime, it seems, if the person doing it "has reason to believe" it could be used "to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation." That condition does not seem to apply to information from do ents.
In the Pentagon Papers case, Justice Byron R. White, joined by Justice Potter Stewart, said "it seems undeniable that a newspaper" can be "vulnerable to prosecution" under the 1917 law.
Indeed, the Nixon administration considered prosecuting The Times even after the government lost the Pentagon Papers case, according to a 1975 memoir by Whitney North Seymour Jr., who was the United States attorney in Manhattan in the early 1970's. Mr. Seymour wrote that Richard G. Kleindienst, a deputy attorney general, suggested convening a grand jury in New York to that end. Mr. Seymour said he refused.
Some experts believe he would not have won. The most authoritative analysis of the 1917 law, by Harold Edgar and Benno C. Schmidt Jr. in the Columbia Law Review in 1973, concluded, based largely on the law's legislative history, that it was not meant to apply to newspapers.
A second law is less ambiguous. Enacted in 1950, it prohibits publication of government codes and other "communications intelligence activities." Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who took part in terrorism investigations in New York after the Sept. 11 attacks, said that both The Times, for its disclosures about the eavesdropping program, and The Post, for an article about secret C.I.A. prisons, had violated the 1917 law. The Times, he added, has also violated the 1950 law.
"It was irresponsible to publish these things," Mr. McCarthy said. "I wouldn't hesitate to prosecute."
The reporters who wrote the two articles recently won Pulitzer Prizes.
Even legal scholars who are sympathetic to the newspapers say the legal questions are not straightforward.
"They are making threats that they may be able to carry out technically, legally," Geoffrey R. Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago and the author of "Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime," said of the administration. The law, Professor Stone added, "has always been understood to be about spying, not about newspapers, but read literally it could be applied to both."
Others say the law is uncons utional as applied to the press under the First Amendment.
"I don't think that anyone believes that statute is cons utional," said James C. Goodale, who was the general counsel of The New York Times Company during the Pentagon Papers litigation. "Literally read, the statute must be violated countless times every year."
Rodney A. Smolla, the dean of the University of Richmond law school, took a middle ground. He said the existing laws were ambiguous but that in theory it could be cons utional to make receiving classified information a crime. However, he continued, the First Amendment may protect newspapers exposing wrongdoing by the government.
The two newspapers contend that their reporting did bring to light important information about potential government misconduct. Representatives of the papers said they had not been contacted by government investigators in connection with the two articles.
That is baffling, Mr. McCarthy said. At a minimum, he said, the reporters involved should be threatened with prosecution in an effort to learn their sources.
"If you think this is a serious offense and you really think national security has been damaged, and I do," he said, "you don't wait five or six months to ask the person who obviously knows the answer."
Case Against 2 Lobbyists
Curiously, perhaps the most threatening pending case for journalist is one brought against two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac. The lobbyists, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, were indicted in August on charges of violating the 1917 law by receiving and repeating national defense information to foreign officials and reporters.
The lobbyists say the case against them is functionally identical to potential cases against reporters.
"You can't say, 'Well, this is cons utional as applied to lobbyists, but it wouldn't be cons utional if applied to journalists,' " Abbe D. Lowell, a lawyer for Mr. Rosen, said at a hearing in the case last month, according to a court transcript.
In court papers filed in January, prosecutors disagreed, saying lobbyist and journalist were different. But they would not rule out the possibility of also charging journalists under the law.
"Prosecution under the espionage laws of an actual member of the press for publishing classified information leaked to it by a government source would raise legitimate and serious issues and would not be undertaken lightly," the papers said. Indeed, they continued, "the fact that there has never been such a prosecution speaks for itself."
Some First Amendment lawyers suspect that the case against the lobbyists is but a first step.
"From the point of view of the administration expanding its powers, the Aipac case is the perfect case," said Ronald K. L. Collins, a scholar at the First Amendment Center, a nonprofit educational group in Virginia. "It allows them to try to establish the precedent without going after the press."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
===============================
As with Trickie Nixon claiming executive privilege as national security when in fact it was "Nixon security", the WH Repugs are intent on shutting out and intimidating the press so the Repugs can govern in secrecy (eg, head setting national energy policy in secrecy with energy industry bigwigs), because the s bag Repugs are as fundamentally anti-democratic as they are autocratic.
Do we have to put gate after every controversy now, let's use some imagination
Actually, of all the "-gates" of the past couple of decades, this one comes closer to deserving the suffix than all but the first. Seeing as how the trysts with hookers was allegedly taking place at the Watergate Hotel.
Breach of Contract with America?
Congressmen are basically s, and they're using other s? Is that even a criminal offense?
Why go to a hotel when Barney Frank's apartment could come out of retirement?
Speaking of hookers, Rawstory is reporting that Gannon maybe coming out...
RawstoryGANNON COMES OUT: FORMER ESCORT FAMOUS FOR WHITE HOUSE VISITS PUBLICLY ADMITS HE'S GAY FOR FIRST TIME, ENDORSES SOME OUTING OF ANTI-GAY LAWMAKERS... DEVELOPING...
Joshua Marshall of Talking Points Memo examines the Porter Goss and Foggo relationship...
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 Mitc 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-cons utional 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.
It even envolves the CIA
BY RICHARD SISK and JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Outgoing CIA Director Porter Goss shakes hands with President Bush yesterday at surprise White House announcement of Goss' resignation after only a year.
WASHINGTON - CIA Director Porter Goss abruptly resigned yesterday amid allegations that he and a top aide may have attended Watergate poker parties where bribes and pros utes were provided to a corrupt congressman.
Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the No. 3 official at the CIA, could soon be indicted in a widening FBI investigation of the parties thrown by defense contractor Brent Wilkes, named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the bribery conviction of former Rep. Randall (Duke) Cunningham, law enforcement sources said.
A CIA spokeswoman said Foggo went to the lavish weekly hospitality-suite parties at the Watergate and Westin Grand hotels but "just for poker."
Intelligence and law enforcement sources said solid evidence had yet to emerge that Goss also went to the parties, but Goss and Foggo share a fondness for poker and expensive cigars, and the FBI investigation was continuing.
Larry Johnson, a former CIA operative and a Bush administration critic, said Goss "had a relationship with Dusty and with Brent Wilkes that's now coming under greater scrutiny."
Johnson vouched for the integrity of Foggo and Goss but said, "Dusty was a big poker player, and it's my understanding that Porter Goss was also there \[at Wilkes' parties\] for poker. It's going to be guilt by association."
"It's all about the Duke Cunningham scandal," a senior law enforcement official told the Daily News in reference to Goss' resignation. Duke, a California Republican, was sentenced to more than eight years in prison after pleading guilty in November to taking $2.4 million in homes, yachts and other bribes in exchange for steering government contracts.
Goss' inability to handle the allegations swirling around Foggo prompted John Negroponte, the director of National Intelligence, who oversees all of the nation's spy agencies, to press for the CIA chief's ouster, the senior official said. The official said Goss is not an FBI target but "there is an impending indictment" of Foggo for steering defense contracts to his poker buddies.
One subject of the FBI investigation is a $3 million CIA contract that went to Wilkes to supply bottled water and other goods to CIA operatives in Iraq and Afghanistan, sources said.
In a hastily arranged Oval Office announcement that stunned official Washington, neither President Bush nor Goss offered a substantive reason for why the head of the spy agency was leaving after only a year on the job.
"He has led ably" in an era of CIA transition, Bush said with Goss seated at his side. "He has a five-year plan to increase the analysts and operatives."
Goss said the trust Bush placed in him "is something I could never have imagined." "I believe the agency is on a very even keel, sailing well," he said.
The official Bush administration spin that emerged later was that Goss lost out in a turf battle with Negroponte, but Goss' tenure was marked by the resignations of several veteran operatives who viewed him as an amateur out of his depth.
White House officials said Bush would announce early next week his choice to succeed Goss. Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, Negroponte's top deputy, heads the list of potential replacements, with White House counterterror chief Fran Townsend also on the short list.
Negroponte "apparently had no confidence" in Goss, and Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board was also "very alarmed by problems at the CIA," said a congressional source involved in oversight of U.S. spy agencies.
"Supposedly the \[Cunningham\] scandal was the last straw," the source said. "This administration may be on the verge of a major scandal."
Here are some other scandals in the CIA's recent history:
A human-rights furor erupted in 2005 with revelations that the CIA had set up secret prisons in Eastern European countries to interrogate terror suspects.
CIA Director George Tenet took blame for the since-debunked claim in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had purchased enriched uranium from Africa — a major part of his case for why the U.S. should go to war. Heavily criticized over questionable intelligence on the Iraq war and terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Tenet resigned in 2004.
Former CIA Director John Deutch's security clearance was suspended in 1999 because he improperly kept classified material on a home computer vulnerable to Internet hackers.
A State Department official revealed in 1994 that the CIA covered up what it knew about the role of a Guatemalan colonel, a paid informer, in the slaying of rebel leader Efrain Bamaca, who was married to an American citizen.
CIA agent Aldrich Ames spied for the KGB for nine years, until his arrest in 1994, giving the Soviets the names of every undercover agent the CIA had in Moscow, leading to the deaths of at least nine agents.
The agency was implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, the Reagan-era scheme to secretly fund Nicaraguan rebels by illegally selling arms to Tehran.
Big Brother is watching us, but who is watching big brother?????
That expired when Newt was gone.
More than 90% of american women are basically hookers. USA would have to arrest most women and we know this will not happen. Wave a few hundreds and them es will do anything with anyone.
^^Oh, boy. That last post ought to bring out some nice responses.
This post deli...
wait for iiiiiit....
A Republican Congressman is threatening to do the corporate media's job and spill the beans on the whole Hookergate scandal..
WNDIf cuts in New York state's Homeland Security allocation are not restored, Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., is threatening to launch an investigation into rumors of orgies involving CIA officers at the Watergate Hotel.
King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, made the threat on WABC Radio's John Gambling show yesterday.
" to me raises very serious questions about the judgment and the sincerity of the department and everything they do," he said. "If they can't get something like this right, how can we trust them to get anything right? So I am going to be investigating them from top to bottom, and one clear example is this whole scandal with Congressman Duke Cunningham, which has now unfolded to include orgies at the Watergate Hotel."
...
"People were driven to the Watergate Hotel for these orgies in limousines," King said. "The limousine company is owned by a convicted criminal that lost their previous contracts with school districts because they were incompetent. And the Department of Homeland Security gave them a $21 million contract to drive their top officials around Washington."
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