Nice profile of Henry Waxman in today’s Washington Post, although it’s really more of a profile of how he and his staff operate, which is even better. If you’re into muckraking, you’ll practically salivate at how smart and effective the committee’s Democratic staff has been:
But the real secret, Waxman said, is simply to follow investigations wherever they lead. When Republicans were in control of Congress, the committee began looking into the activities of felonious lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a probe that turned up e-mails that Bush administration officials sent via Republican National Committee accounts. When Democrats took over, Waxman pursued it further, producing evidence that administration officials as high as former presidential adviser Karl Rove had violated federal rules by using RNC e-mails to cover their tracks on official business, including the controversial firings of U.S. attorneys allegedly for political reasons.
As it turns out, thousands of RNC e-mails have disappeared, stoking still more investigations.
Waxman’s fascination with government contracting led him to investigate the pricing on a contract between the General Services Administration and Sun Microsystems and a no-bid job, ultimately terminated, that GSA chief Lurita Alexis Doan had given to a longtime friend.
When committee aides asked the GSA for information about the contracts, they inadvertently received documents on a political briefing that a White House political aide had given to GSA political appointees after the 2006 elections. In subsequent interviews, multiple sources told committee investigators that, at the conclusion of the briefing, Doan asked what could be done to “help our candidates” in the next elections.
Now, that investigation has swelled, as committee staffers seek to catalogue all the political presentations and activities that White House political staff members marshaled in federal agencies in connection with the 2006 elections.
Pulling threads to see what they unravel–whodathunkit? But compare that to this tacit admission from Waxman’s predecessor as chairman, Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA): “For the administration, and for a lot of others, people need to be careful now. Someone is looking over their shoulder.”
