So said Diane Feinstein yesterday. I ask again, what has the NSA got in her file?
The positions of Senate Democrats like Schumer and Feinstein are becoming harder and harder to justify. How either can possibly have been said to have done their duty to the constitution or the electorate in approving Mukasey is a mystery: both senators’s said their stickling point on his approval as Attorney General was what Mukasey defines as tolrture and specifically one point: whether or not he thinks waterboardiong. is torture.
But why?
Why did they make that the pivotal issue, when there are much bigger stumbling blocks ro appointing Mulkasey to to be the nation’s lawyer? Things like Mukasey’s belief that there are few limits to executive power: for example this is the man who held that the arrest and indefinite detention of US citizens withoiut charge or trial by the military was legal:
On December 4, 2002, Mukasey ruled that “the President is authorized under the Constitution and by law to direct the military to detain enemy combatants in the circumstances present here, such that Padilla’s detention is not per se unlawful.” Instead, Mukasey ruled only that Padilla could “submit facts and argument” to challenge whether there was “some evidence” supporting President Bush’s finding that he was an “enemy combatant.”
The Second Circuit overturned Mukasey’s decision on December 18, 2003, holding that the Non Detention Act (18 U.S.C. 4001(a)) prohibited Padilla’s detention and that the president had not shown that “Padilla’s detention can nonetheless be grounded in the President’s inherent constitutional powers.”
But then Schumer and Feinstein have reason to go along to get along.
Schumer’s financial doings are not above scrutiny, and a new attorney general might find Feinstein’s past activities interesting if allegations against her are true. Best to keep him sweet.
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.
[…]
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.
[…]
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.”
For all I know that whole waterboarding thing was cooked up by Schumer and Feinstein to enable them to find excuses to approve Bush’s subpar AG pick. I don’t know what Schumer’s motivation was, but allegations of corruption made against Feinstein and her husband could conceivably have had some bearing.
Democratic lawmakers involved in corruption may well feel they’ve dodged a bullet with the demise of Gonzales and with the slow unraveling of the Republican US attorney scandal in which Democratic politicians in key swing areas were targeted for investigation by Bushco partisans. but that doesn’t mean there are no longer any pressure points available to this criminal administration. Who knows who’s being wiretapped?
In any case, ikt woluldn’t be the first time Feinstein cosied up to Bush and did his bidding:
Bush invited Sen. Dianne Feinstein to join him on Air Force One during his trip. It may not have been coincidence that less than 24 hours earlier, Feinstein played a pivotal role in allowing Judge Leslie Southwick, a target of liberal groups, to be confirmed to an appeals court when she voted to block a filibuster and support the president’s nomination.
With a 7:40 a.m. Thursday departure from Andrews Air Force Base, Feinstein found herself seated in the rear of the plane with a handful of Southern California congressional representatives. After a breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage and French toast, Bush popped back for what the senator described as a frank two-hour conversation, mostly about foreign policy.
Am I suggesting Feinstein was pressured into approving Mukasey? You might say so, I couldn’t possibly comment…
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.
Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, is a managing associate with Carmen Group, a D.C.-based governmental-affairs firm (www.carmengrouplobbying.com).
Even bearing in mind the conservative source, that’s some accusation and ikt’s not the only one out there. Would accusations like those and maybe a little supplementary inmformation supplied by illagl wiretapping (and I ask this entirely hypothetically of course) be enough swing an attorney general’s approval Bush’s way – or is there more?
I wonder.
