Republicans are planning a wave of committee investigations targeting the White House and Democratic allies if they win back the majority.
Everything from the microscopic — the New Black Panther party — to the massive –- think bailouts — is on the GOP to-do list, according to a half-dozen Republican aides interviewed by POLITICO.
Republican staffers say there won’t be any self-destructive witch hunts, but they clearly are relishing the prospect of extracting information from an administration that touts transparency.
And a handful of aggressive would-be committee chairmen — led by Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Lamar Smith (R-Texas) — are quietly gearing up for a possible season of subpoenas not seen since the Clinton wars of the late 1990s.
And then the article lists six possible investigations:
Jobgate: Issa has made no secret of his interest in getting to the bottom of muddled, mishandled White House attempts to force Democratic Senate candidates Joe Sestak and Andrew Romanoff from races in Pennsylvania and Colorado.
Bailoutgate: No investigation poses a more significant political danger to Obama than a no-holds-barred GOP probe into TARP, the AIG bailout, the Freddie-Fannie sinkhole and the administration’s de facto takeover of GM and Chrysler.
Mortgagegate: Sen. Chris Dodd’s embarrassing placement on the company’s VIP mortgage list played a major role in the Connecticut Democrat’s involuntary retirement earlier this year.
Black-Panthergate: Smith, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, has already pressed Holder to look into charges that members of the New Black Panther Party intimidated voters at a Philadelphia polling place in 2008.
ACORNgate: A whole host of Republicans — led by Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Steve King (R-Iowa) on the party’s right wing — have demanded an investigation into the defunct community organizing group’s ties to the Obama campaign.
Gulf-Spillgate: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has admitted MMS officials were asleep at the switch in monitoring BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform before it blew up. But Issa is bent on finding out which Obama administration officials were responsible for missing the warning signs and why clean-up and response efforts didn’t take place more quickly.
(Steeples fingers) Mwahahahahahaaaa! I mean – that’s interesting.
A House investigative panel has decided to charge Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California with ethics violations, raising the possibility of a second high-profile trial with political implications for Democrats this fall.
People familiar with the investigation, who were not authorized to be quoted about unannounced charges, say the allegations could be announced next week. The House ethics committee declined Friday to make any public statement on the matter.
Waters has been under investigation for a possible conflict of interest involving a bank that was seeking federal aid. Her husband owned stock in the bank.
New York Democrat Rep. Charles Rangel also faces an ethics trial this fall on separate charges that included failure to disclose assets and income, nonpayment of taxes and doing legislative favors for donors to a college center named after him.
Both Waters and Rangel are prominent members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Dual ethics trials would be a major political liability for Democrats, forcing them to defend their party’s ethical conduct while trying to hold on to their House majority.
While Rangel is a former chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, Waters is a prominent member of the Financial Services Committee.
Waters came under scrutiny after former Treasury Department officials said she helped arrange a meeting between regulators and executives at Boston-based OneUnited Bank without mentioning her husband’s financial ties to the institution.
So that’s two Democrats on trial for ethics violations. I wonder if we can get three before the mid-term elections?
The radical activist group ACORN “works” for the Democratic Party and deliberately promotes election fraud, ACORN employees told FBI investigators, according to an FBI document dump Wednesday.
The documents obtained by Judicial Watch, a watchdog group, are FBI investigators’ reports related to the 2007 investigation and arrest of eight St. Louis, Mo., workers from ACORN’s Project Vote affiliate for violation of election laws. All eight employees involved in the scandal later pleaded guilty to voter registration fraud.
Project Vote is ACORN’s voter registration arm. Project Vote continues to operate despite the reported dissolution of the national structure of ACORN.
The handwritten reports by FBI agents show that ACORN employees reported numerous irregularities in the nonprofit group’s business practices.
WINTERY KNIGHT 