TPM Reader JM from

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TPM Reader JM from Florida strikes early in the TPM ‘Nice Try’ Brigade contest bagging a choice nice try from WaPo blogger Chris Cillizza of the new WaPo blog “The Fix”.

On “The Fix” today Cillizza posted a “political scandal scorecard” and in the House of Reps he listed …

Tom DeLay (R-TX)
Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA)
Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH)
Rep. Bill Jefferson (D-LA)
Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA)
Former Rep. Frank Ballance (D-NC)

Now, who, you might be asking, is Rep. Frank Ballance? Well, without him included the list might have seemed awfully weighted toward Republicans.

Cillizza’s list was supposed to be about scandals in the “past year” and limited to those “members of Congress and governors currently in office.”

Cillizza seemed to see there might be some problem with Ballance since he resigned from Congress a year and a half ago. And under Ballance’s name he explained …

Yes, we said we’re limiting this list to current members, but this is a fairly recent case so we’re making a small exception to the rule. Ballance left office in 2004 and pleaded guilty to charges of mishandling money controlled by his charitable foundation.

In the story Cillizza links to, we see that Ballance was elected in 2002 and resigned from Congress in the summer of 2004. In November 2004 he pled guilty to one charge of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering.

But it gets better. From what I can gather from the article, Ballance’s crimes weren’t even committed when he was serving in Congress.

Quoting from the Post’s article from November 10th, 2004 …

The indictment alleged that Ballance channeled $2.3 million in state money from 1994 to 2003 to a nonprofit foundation he operated to help poor people fight drug and alcohol abuse. According to the indictment, more than $100,000 from the John A. Hyman Memorial Youth Foundation went to Ballance’s law firm; his church; his mother, Alice Eason Ballance; his daughter, Valerie Ballance; and his son, Garey Ballance.

Remember, Ballance entered Congress in 2003. So what this sounds like is that over the decade before he entered Congress Ballance diverted a hundred grand from his non-profit to various parties tied to him or family. So Ballance gets on the list for something he resigned from for in the 2004 and did before he even got to Congress. Pretty hard to distinguish those facts from DeLay, Doolittle, Jefferson, Ney and Cunningham — each of whom is either under indictment or the target of an on-going criminal investigation, isn’t it.

On this one you can see that Cillizza was really striving for Ballance and, well … he achieved it.

Late Update: Former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland resigned from office around the same time Rep. Ballance bailed out of the House. No exception for him on Cillizza’s list of scandal governors.

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