ACORN

Judge Halts Ban On ACORN Funding -- For Now

Zachary Roth | December 11, 2009, 6:30PM

A judge has put an injunction on Congress's ban on ACORN funding.

U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon today ruled to put a preliminary injunction on the Congressional resolution that barred ACORN or its affiliates from receiving federal funds, according to a press release from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who blasted the move.
Congress had acted in the wake of the scandal in which ACORN employees were caught on camera giving advice on how to break the law to two people posing as a pimp and a prostitute.

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Joe Arpaio

In Boldest Move Yet, Arpaio And Ally Charge Judge With Bribery, Despite Lack Of Evidence

Zachary Roth | December 11, 2009, 1:27PM

Sheriff Joe Arpaio

For a while now, there's been plenty of evidence of Sheriff Joe Arpaio abusing his law enforcement powers to target political enemies. Indeed, Justice Department investigators are said to have been looking into the issue for the last year.

But Arpaio may now have taken things into a whole new realm. This week, the top cop for Maricopa County, Arizona, who has used media-friendly stunts to gain a national reputation as a law-and-order zealot and bete noir of illegal immigrants, announced the filing of a criminal complaint against his latest target: a judge who's involved in several of the controversial cases Sheriff Joe has helped bring.

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Bennie Thompson

Party Favors: House Staffers' Event Planning Biz Specializes In Bashes For Top Dem Rep

Justin Elliott | December 11, 2009, 12:13PM

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS)

A party planning side business run by three current and former congressional staffers raked in over $20,000 last year from lobbyists holding events to honor Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) -- whose own communications director is co-founder of the firm.

The apparent arrangement between Thompson and the business, Chic Productions, at once allows private interests to get closer to the congressman's office and gives the staffers a way to dip a straw into the river of outside money flowing through Capitol Hill.

Chic Productions offers "high style events with simple elegance" and advertises its previous work executing "congressional events and fundraising parties." One of Chic's principals was quoted in 2007 saying congressional events make up roughly 90 percent of the firm's business.

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Max Baucus

Baucus's Girlfriend Withdrew US Atty. Nomination Only After Paper's Inquiries

Justin Elliott | December 11, 2009, 10:00AM

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT)

Sen. Max Baucus' girlfriend withdrew from consideration to be Montana's U.S. attorney in March only after a newspaper told Baucus' office it was about to publish a story on the senator's nomination of Melodee Hanes. The revelation appears to belie Baucus' original explanation -- that Hanes withdrew "after much reflection ... because [the two] wanted to live together in Washington, D.C."

That Baucus, a Montana Democrat, recommended Hanes to the White House to be U.S. Attorney was revealed last week by Main Justice. A former Baucus staffer, Hanes explained her withdrawal in March by saying she had "been presented with other opportunities that I felt I could not bypass."

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Defense Contractors

Pentagon Increasingly Pays Defense Contractors To Test Their Own Projects

Justin Elliott | December 10, 2009, 6:11PM

A Manned Ground Vehicle (MGV), part of the Future Combat System

In 2007, the Defense Department paid the same private companies working on the Army's modernization program to tell the DOD how the program was going, according to a not-yet-public inspector general report.

Politico got an early look at the IG report, which notes that, between 1987 and 2007, the DOD's use of contractors for testing and quality control increased by 375 percent. The report finds that the trend toward privatization began in the 1990s, and continued through the Bush years.

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Rod Jetton

Police Report On Jetton Incident Released

Zachary Roth | December 10, 2009, 1:35PM

Former Missouri House Speaker Rod Jetton

New information has emerged about the allegations that led to a felony assault charge being filed against a former top Missouri GOP pol, in connection with a November sexual encounter.

An incident report, taken by police a day and a half after the alleged assault took place, lists three "offenses" alleged against Rod Jetton, who until last year was Speaker of the House: second degree assault, rape, and felonious restraint.

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Jaish-e-Muhammad

What Were Five American Men Doing At Militant-Linked House In Pakistan?

Justin Elliott | December 10, 2009, 10:30AM

Five young men from Northern Virginia have been arrested in Pakistan in a house with links to a militant group, but they have not been charged with a crime and details of what they were doing are still hard to come by. But the case is already being cited as the latest example in an emerging trend of radicalization of American Muslims who travel overseas and link up with foreign terrorist groups.

Here's the basic outlines of the story, as it has been reported so far: five American Muslim men, ranging in age from their late teens to mid-20s, flew to Pakistan earlier this month and, after bouncing around several cities, ended up in a house in Sargodha, in Punjab Province. The owner of the house where they were arrested reportedly has ties to the group Jaish-e-Muhammad, considered a terrorist organization by the United States.

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Robo-calls

Another GOP-Linked Group Working To Undermine Robo-Call Laws

Zachary Roth | December 10, 2009, 9:35AM

A Republican-tied robo-call firm, whose president once reportedly boasted of his company's ability to "deliver a voter suppression message" to unfriendly voters, is working to undermine state restrictions on robo-calls.

In comments filed Wednesday with the FEC, and examined by TPMmuckraker, ccAdvertizing argues that state laws restricting robocalls are pre-empted by a more lenient federal law. The comments were submitted in support of an earlier effort by another shady GOP-tied group, American Future Fund Political Action (AFFPA), to get the FEC to rule against the state laws. We reported on the AFFPA move here.

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Mark Sanford

Lawmakers Vote Down Sanford Impeachment

Zachary Roth | December 9, 2009, 4:02PM

Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC)

Embattled South Carolina governor Mark Sanford may have won an unexpected reprieve.

A panel of state lawmakers voted by 6-1 today not to move forward with impeachment charges, which stemmed from the the governor's legendary Argentinean romp this summer, as well as his use of state aircraft. The legislators said Sanford's misdeeds -- among them, leaving the state for five days to visit his mistress, without notifying the lieutenant governor of his absence -- were not so serious as to merit his removal from office.

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Neel Kashkari

Former Bailout Czar Signs On With Firm That Helped Run Bailout

Zachary Roth | December 9, 2009, 3:10PM

Neel Kashkari

What a difference a day makes.

On Sunday, we learned from a florid Washington Post profile that Neel Kashkari, the Treasury Department's one-time bailout czar, is now Thoreau-ing it up in the Northern California woods. (Sample line: "The moon hits his stubble, which is six days old.") But the very next day, the investment behemoth PIMCO announced that it had hired Kashkari as a managing director and the head of new investment initiatives.

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Surveillance

How Easy Is It For The Police To Get GPS Data From Your Phone?

Justin Elliott | December 9, 2009, 2:13PM

Police can in some cases track cell phone location by merely telling a court that the information is relevant to an investigation, a legal expert tells TPM -- a fact that may partly explain how law enforcement racked up 8 million requests for GPS data from a single wireless carrier in a year.

An increasingly popular and easy-to-access surveillance tool for police, GPS data is not currently protected by the Fourth Amendment, and the standards for gaining access to the information are murky and highly variable. That's partly because one of the statutes that bears on the issue was passed in the mid-1980s, before many of the technologies involved were invented. And Congress hasn't done much to update the law since.

The issue at stake is the demise of so-called "locational privacy."

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Jack Abramoff

Supremes Could Weaken Key Anti-Corruption Law That Helped Convict Abramoff, Jefferson, Others

Zachary Roth | December 9, 2009, 12:35PM

Fmr. Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D-IL) and fmr. Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA)

An anti-corruption law that has been central to the convictions of numerous public officials and corporate executives in recent years could be at risk of being struck down or narrowed after it was met with extreme skepticism by the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday.

The honest services law, enacted in 1988, makes it a crime "to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services." Prosecutors frequently use it against politicians or corporate executives believed to have defrauded their constituents or employers. Jack Abramoff, former congressman William Jefferson, former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling, and newspaper magnate Conrad Black all have been convicted, at least in part, of honest services fraud in the last few years.

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Rod Jetton

Jetton Fought To Keep Ban On Gay Sex, Calling It 'Deviate Sexual Intercourse'

Zachary Roth | December 9, 2009, 9:56AM

Former Missouri House Speaker Rod Jetton

Rod Jetton, the former Missouri House Speaker, fired a state lawmaker from his committee chairmanship in 2007 because the lawmaker had changed a bill in order to end a state ban on gay sex -- or what Jetton called "deviate sexual intercourse."

Jetton was charged with felony assault Monday after a girlfriend alleged that he had beaten and choked her during a recent sexual encounter, in which she failed to use a mutually agreed upon "safe word." The woman also suggested that Jetton may have slipped a date-rape drug into her glass of wine, causing her to lose consciousness. In the wake of the charges, Jetton announced that the political consulting firm he has run since leaving office last year would close its doors.

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Bush Administration

Gonzo: We Should Have Known We'd Get Caught Purging US Attorneys

Justin Elliott | December 9, 2009, 9:11AM

Esquire's interview with Alberto Gonzales

Alberto Gonzales has taken a break from his teaching load at Texas Tech to give a remarkably unselfconscious interview with Esquire, saying the Bush Administration should have dropped its plan to purge U.S. attorneys in 2006 because "at that point we could really not count on Republicans to cut off investigations or help us at all with investigations."

By Gonzo's reasoning, the problem was not the firings themselves, but rather the prospect that the Bush Administration would get caught:

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Rod Jetton

Former House Speaker Charged With Felony Assault After Sexual Encounter

Zachary Roth | December 8, 2009, 3:24PM

Former Missouri House Speaker Rod Jetton

The former speaker of the Missouri House has been charged with a felony after what looks like a bout of sado-masochistic sex that went way too far.

Details are still unconfirmed, we should note. But a woman appears to have suggested to police that Rod Jetton, a Republican who now works as a political consultant, may have slipped something into her drink, then beat her up during sex, after she failed to use the safe word they had agreed upon as a signal to calm things down.

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Pay-For-Delay

Reid's Latest Thorny Issue On Health-Care Bill: Pay-For-Delay

Zachary Roth | December 8, 2009, 1:58PM

Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI)

Here's an interesting window into the legislative sausage-making process - and a classic example, among countless others, of the way in which Senate leaders working on health-care reform are having to walk a tightrope between well-meaning policy goals and crude political imperatives.

As we reported last week, Senator Herb Kohl (D-WI) has sponsored a measure designed to crack down on "pay-for-delay" deals by pharmaceutical companies, in which the maker of a brand-name drug pays a generic to hold off on marketing its cheaper drug, thereby preserving the brand-name's monopoly. This textbook anti-competitive tactic is hugely valuable to drug-makers, because it essentially allows them to buy more protection than their patent confers. But by keeping cheaper generic drugs off the market, it costs consumers billions -- and those costs fall disproportionately on the uninsured.

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AirTran Flight 297

Flight 297 Passenger: Tedd Petruna Is 'Living In A Fantasy World'

Justin Elliott | December 8, 2009, 11:38AM

Flight 297 passenger Brent Brown

A security consultant who was a passenger on AirTran Flight 297 says the man who claims he thwarted porn-watching Muslim hijackers clearly fabricated the story, but Brent Brown adds that the airline's version of events underplays the seriousness of what happened.

Brown told WSBTV that Tedd Petruna, who says a group of Muslim terrorists were casing the plane, is "living in a fantasy world." (Petruna now has his own hash tag on Twitter.)

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Muslim Mafia

Why Have The Feds Taken Interest In Muslim Mafia Case?

Justin Elliott | December 8, 2009, 10:10AM

Muslim Mafia Co-Author David Gaubatz

A string of mysterious sealed filings and orders in a case pitting a Islamic group against the authors of Muslim Mafia -- as well as a WorldNetDaily claim about an FBI intervention -- suggests that some aspect of the case has caught the attention of federal authorities.

The question in the case has become: who is under scrutiny by the Feds? Is it the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or could it be Dave Gaubatz, the man behind the WND-published book that purports to expose CAIR as a terrorist front?

CAIR sued Gaubatz and his son, Chris, over thousands of pages of documents taken while Chris was working as an intern at CAIR, undercover as a Muslim convert. WND says the book, which is partly based on the documents, shows CAIR is a terrorist front devoted to instituting "Saudi-style Islamic law" in America.

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AirTran Flight 297

FAA: Probe Found No Violations On 'Muslim Hijacking' Flight

Justin Elliott | December 7, 2009, 3:40PM

An AirTran Boeing 717

The Federal Aviation Administration investigated an episode in which an AirTran flight was taxied back to the gate in Atlanta last month and found no violations of safety rules, another blow to the story of a NASA employee who says he helped thwart a dry run of Muslim hijackers on the plane.

"The FAA is charged with enforcing civil air safety violations and among those are rules that require passengers to comply with flight attendant instructions and about use of electronic devices," FAA spokesperson Kathleen Bergen tells TPMmuckraker. "We found no violations of the regulations." She said the investigation of the Nov. 17 incident was closed Friday.

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ACORN

ACORN Report Finds No Illegal Conduct

Zachary Roth | December 7, 2009, 1:51PM

ACORN employees caught in those undercover videos advising a couple posing as a pimp and a prostitute on how to break the law acted unprofessionally and inappropriately, but did nothing illegal, a report commissioned by ACORN and conducted by an independent investigator has found.

The report, by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, recommends nine steps for ACORN to take in order to regain public trust in the wake of the scandal, including that it return to its "core competency - community organizing and citizen engagement empowerment, with related services."

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AirTran Flight 297

NASA Diver Insists Tale Of Porn-Watching Muslim Hijackers Is True, Despite Discrepancies

Justin Elliott | December 7, 2009, 1:39PM

A scene from the 1997 film Air Force One

A man who claims he witnessed a "dry run" by Muslim hijackers on a plane at Atlanta's airport last month told TPMmuckraker this morning he is standing by his story, despite several holes in the tale and the carrier's claim he was not even on the plane.

In an email account of his experience that went national on right-wing blogs last week, Tedd Petruna describes a group of 11 Muslim men "in full attire" who created a disturbance on a Nov. 17 AirTran flight on the runway at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport.

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Global Warming

Bush Climate Team Still Impacting The Debate, Report Finds

Nick Pinto | December 7, 2009, 11:39AM

James L. Connaughton, President Bush’s chief environmental advisor from 2001 to 2009.

As the next round of UN climate change negotiations begin in Copenhagen, a new report describes how 22 Bush-era officials are still influencing the climate debate, many of them as registered lobbyists for industry.

Among the former officials listed in the report from watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington are the following:

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John Ensign

Report: Former Top Ensign Aide Subpoenaed By Ethics Committee

Rachel Slajda | December 7, 2009, 10:45AM

Sen. John Ensign (R-NV)

Sen. John Ensign's (R-NV) former chief of staff, Mike Slanker, has reportedly been subpoenaed by the Senate Ethics Committee in connection with a probe into Ensign's affair and subsequent severance payments.

Slanker has been a consultant to Connecticut senatorial candidate Linda McMahon's campaign. A spokesman for the campaign confirmed to the Hartford Courant that Slanker received the subpoena.

As we reported last week, the Senate Ethics Committee has begun to send out subpoenas to key players in the scandal -- a sign that the probe is heating up.

Slanker had worked on Ensign's campaign and was the political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee when Ensign was its chair.

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James Sensenbrenner

To Get Around Ban On Financing Lawmaker Trips, Corporations Turn To Non-Profits

Zachary Roth | December 7, 2009, 10:22AM

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI)

The New York Times sheds light on the hot new tactic for lawmakers who want to get around Congressional ethics rules that ban corporate-financed travel. Just use a non-profit group -- which aren't subject to the ban -- as a pass through for corporate money.

That's how it seems to have worked when Republican congressmen James Sensenbrenner and Tom Price traveled to Liechtenstein in February to learn about its banking system -- as well as to visit a ski resort and tour the Prince of Lichtenstein's wine cellar.

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Bennie Thompson

Ethics Panel Probing Homeland Security Committee's Ties To Lobbyists

Zachary Roth | December 7, 2009, 9:38AM

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS)

Did Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the chair of the Homeland Security committee, hold hearings on identity theft with the goal of scaring credit-card companies into making political donations? That charge is at the heart of a set of issues being investigated by the House Ethics committee, reports the Washington Post.

Last March, Thompson held hearings on whether credit-card companies should be forced to bolster security in order to protect customers from identity theft -- something the companies oppose.

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