Corruption is not only a Male/Republican thing

[BIG IRISH]

Feinstein’s Cardinal shenanigans
By David Keene
April 30, 2007
Anyone who knows much about real power in Congress knows that almost every member of the House and Senate lusts after a seat on the Appropriations Committee and hopes one day to achieve the status of Cardinal. The Cardinals, of course, are the folks who chair the various Appropriations Committee subcommittees and literally control the billions of dollars that pass through their hands.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) chairs the Senate Rules Committee, but she’s also a Cardinal. She is currently chairwoman of the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies subcommittee, but until last year was for six years the top Democrat on the Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies (or “Milcon”) sub-committee, where she may have directed more than $1 billion to companies controlled by her husband.

If the inferences finally coming out about what she did while on Milcon prove true, she may be on the way to morphing from a respected senior Democrat into another poster child for congressional corruption.

The problems stem from her subcommittee activities from 2001 to late 2005, when she quit. During that period the public record suggests she knowingly took part in decisions that eventually put millions of dollars into her husband’s pocket — the classic conflict of interest that exploited her position and power to channel money to her husband’s companies.

In other words, it appears Sen. Feinstein was up to her ears in the same sort of shenanigans that landed California Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R) in the slammer. Indeed, it may be that the primary difference between the two is basically that Cunningham was a minor leaguer and a lot dumber than his state’s senior senator.

Melanie Sloan, the executive director of Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington, or CREW, usually focuses on the ethical lapses of Republicans and conservatives, but even she is appalled at the way Sen. Feinstein has abused her position. Sloan told a California reporter earlier this month that while”there are a number of members of Congress with conflicts of interest … because of the amount of money involved, Feinstein’s conflict of interest is an order of magnitude greater than those conflicts.”

And the director of the Project on Government Oversight who examined the evidence of wrongdoing assembled by California writer Peter Byrne told him that “the paper trail showing Senator Feinstein’s conflict of interest is irrefutable.”

It may be irrefutable, but she almost got away without anyone even knowing what she was up to. Her colleagues on the subcommittee, for example, had no reason even to suspect that she knew what companies might benefit from her decisions because that information is routinely withheld to avoid favoritism. What they didn’t know was that her chief legal adviser, who also happened to be a business partner of her husband’s and the vice chairman of one of the companies involved, was secretly forwarding her lists of projects and appropriation requests that were coming before the committee and in which she and her husband had an interest — information that has only come to light recently as a result of the efforts of several California investigative reporters.

This adviser insists — apparently with a straight face — that he provided the information to Feinstein’s chief of staff so that she could recuse herself in cases where there might be a conflict. He says that he assumes she did so. The public record, however, indicates that she went right ahead and fought for these same projects.

During this period the two companies, URS of San Francisco and the Perini Corporation of Framingham, Mass., were controlled by Feinstein’s husband, Richard C. Blum, and were awarded a combined total of over $1.5 billion in government business thanks in large measure to her subcommittee. That’s a lot of money even here in Washington.
Interestingly, she left the subcommittee in late 2005 at about the same time her husband sold his stake in both companies. Their combined net worth increased that year with the sale of the two companies by some 25 percent, to more than $40 million.

In spite of the blatant appearance of corruption, no major publication has picked up on the story, the Senate Ethics Committee has reportedly let her slip by, and she is now chairing the Senate Rules Committee, which puts her in charge of making sure her colleagues act ethically and avoid the sorts of conflicts of interest with which she is personally and so obviously familiar.


With the ^^^^ and all the illegals on her Wine Farm it looks like she is
ready to retire.


http://thehill.com/david-keene/feins...007-04-30.html





, but I doubt it

[Nbadan]

debunked, multiple times already...

For once, the M$M won't touch this story because it's all bullsh1t. Ms. Feinstein couldn't have possibly chaired the MILCON committee for the past six years because Democrats were the Senate minority. She was a ranking minority member most of that time, and the Metroactive is misleading the reader by confusing Ms. Feinstein’s role in the committee.

Metroactive also misleads by stating that Diane Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum "owned" those companies because he didn't.

Even if Ms. Feinstein was chair of the committee during the period, any contract decisions have to be approved by a quorum of the committee and the Senate. Diane Feinstein has been married to Richard Blum for 26 years and disclosed the possibility of a conflict of interest a long time ago. Mr. Blum had those investment holdings long before Diane Feinstein was in the Senate and long before they were married in 1980.

Since she has disclosed the possibility of the conflict of interest the committee itself is the party to decide if Diane Feinstein is steering military contracts through the committee. Since both contractors, UDS and Perini Corp. are longtime government military contractors in all likelyhood someone else, not Ms. Feinstein, made the contractual decisions because the committee and the Senate were well aware of her relationship to Mr. Blum.

Metroactive is a right wing blog in Santa Cruz CA with ties to the Republican National Committee. The primary political function of Metroactive has been to smear Ms. Feinstein and hound her out of the Senate because the Republicans can't come close to defeating her in a statewide election.

If you read the blog you'll see that the Metreoactive's vendetta against Feinstein is laughably groundless and the blog is quite delusional about its own overblown sense of self importance. Metroactive acts as if Diane Feinstein spends her entire day preoccupied with their blogging investigations that 16 wacko Republicans actually read about. I doubt if Ms. Feinstein even knows that Metroactive even exists.

There isn't a conflict of interest because Mr. Blum doesn't and never did own any defense contracting businesses. Richard Blum is investment analyst, founder and senior partner of Blum Capital who once had investment holdings in two different defense contracting firms, Perini Corp. and URS. He divested himself of those holdings in 2005. The Committee and the Senate were both aware of Richard Blum's investment holdings because Diane Feinstein disclosed them to the Senate to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest when she was assigned to work on that committee years ago.

It's perfectly legal and ethical to have a spouse or family member have investment holdings in a company that contracts with the United States government. Mr. Blum had nothing to do with the day to day operations, or contract bidding decisions of Perini Corp or URS because he was not an employee of either company. The ethical violation is not disclosing that relationship and steering contracts to benefit a friend, family member, or your own personal financial interests.

Allow me to point out that George W. Bush's own father is one of the founders of the Carlyle Group who is the largest investor in URS and President Bush routinely signs bills awarding contracts to URS.

Cheney is the former CEO of Halliburton who maintains stock options in Halliburton and was the prime mover behind the decisions to award multi-billion dollar no-bid contracts to Halliburton in Iraq and the post-Katrina construction. As a result Mr. Cheney enriched himself by millions of dollars with those decisions. The extent of Cheney's direct ties to Halliburton are a ethics and legal conflict that Mr. Cheney has never felt significant enough to fully disclose or answer to anyone for. Cheney's ties to Halliburton also raise Mr. Cheney's motivations when he was the primary cheerleader for the Iraq invasion in 2002. Cheney activities on behalf of Halliburton reek with the stench of corruption and greed. If Cheney's case isn't a conflict of interest, then there is no such thing as a conflict of interest.

Nobody in the Republican controlled House and Senate or at the Justice Department felt Mr. Cheney's personal holdings in Halliburton and his no-bid contract awards to Halliburton were worthy of their oversight or investigative attention. War profiteering is in the same class of criminal behavior as treason.

The real reason Diane Feinstein left the MILCON committee in January was her new assignment as chair of Senate Rules Committee. She didn't resign in disgrace but resigned as a mere formality to take on new committee assignments in a newly elected Senate.

The reason why the media didn't " cover it" is all 100 Senators get new committee assignments in a newly election Senate and all of them resign from the committees they no longer serve on. A routine procedural task of the Senate is not newsworthy.

What I find is disturbing is the modus operandi of the right wing blogoshere. Right wing bloggers are well aware of the misleading content of the story but still give the green light for publication. These partisan kamikazes know the story is a great big pile of unmitigated horse crap but they're hoping that some of the bovine manure they're tossing at Diane Feinstein will stick to her. (See John Kerry, Swiftboat Vets for more info)

Metroactive is the party with questionable ethics, not Diane Feinstein. The ethical duty of any journalist is to write a story that is factual and something resembling a fair minded treatment of the subject matter. By that standard Metroactive's news stories would not pass the scrutiny of the editor of high school newspaper.

Apparently the Republicans haven't learned a thing from their route in the 2006 election. They are the same old partisan hacks, cheap liars, swiftboaters, meglomanics, finger pointing incompetents double dealers, bribe takers and low life weasels they've always been. They need to be taken out to the woodshed for another good thrashing in 2008.