GOP’s Ed Rollins: Hookergate is “Big”

GOP super-strategist Ed Rollins (late of the Katherine Harris campaign) made a couple interesting comments on Charlie Rose last night. First, he indicated strongly that he believes a number of the other lawmakers in trouble with Hookergate are Defense appropriators. He also says as many as 15 lawmakers could get indicted over the mess in the next few months.

Maybe Ed’s playing the expectations game: if voters buy the 15 number, and only seven actually get busted, well then the kids aren’t so bad after all. Still, it’s interesting speculation from an insider. I just found the show transcript on Nexis — emphasis is mine:

ED ROLLINS. . . If this House scandal is as big as I think it is from talking to people that are around it — of course it started with Cunningham and it`s moving beyond that.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Duke Cunningham.

ED ROLLINS: Duke Cunningham, a congressman from San Diego who took bribes. There was a real little cabal on the Defense Appropriations Committee in which a couple of people who basically made an awful lot of money off of defense contractors and basically rewarded a bunch of members, Republicans.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Including a story that broke over the weekend, perhaps the use of prostitutes.

ED ROLLINS: The use of prostitutes and what`s occurred in Washington that I think everyone`s disgusted at, is we promised we were going to be different than the Democrats; we weren`t going to basically be beholden to K Street, we were going to be term limits and we weren`t going to be the big PACs and all the rest of it. That`s all gone by the boards, and if anything we may even be worse.

In order to be a chairman of a committee today, you have to go raise millions and millions of dollars to be able to dole out. Not that there`s competitive races, but that`s part of the process. So we have — let me just finish. We have created a culture in which a whole bunch of people have taken a whole bunch of money, and now that you`ve earmarked this stuff — if you end up with eight or nine or as many as 15 members of Congress, even a couple Democrats, getting indicted in the next three or four months, that may be sufficient.