Will the Jefferson bribery probe complicate US relations with Nigeria?
Neocons successfully organize to block Juan Cole’s appointment at Yale.
Yet another subpoena in the investigation of Appropriations Chairman Lewis (R-CA)?
I sent Justin Rood down to check out the Capitol Hill townhouse at the center of former Lewis staffer Letitia White’s earmark factory. But there was no one home to even kick him off the property like usually happens in these cases. He did get some good pictures though.
Cheney hangs tough in the bureaucratic campaign for torture.
After Abramoff…
In 2002, the Justice Department produced a report that the lax immigration laws of the Northern Mariana Islands – a U.S. territory and client of Jack Abramoff – posed a national security risk. It was suppressed. Now it’s finally out.
Okay, I think the preliminaries are over. Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, is in a heap of trouble. NBC’s Lisa Myers got government contractor, Tom Casey, who has a cameo role in the Duke Cunningham/Brent Wilkes scandal, to admit that Lewis shook him down for money and stock options for his lobbyist pal William Lowery.
We’ll be bringing you more details about this shortly. But Lowery is the lobbyist who brings together Wilkes, Cunningham, Lewis and many others all into one nexus of bad acts.
The kettle might be coming to a boil on this one.
Also of note, TPMmuckraker.com’s Justin Rood has been doing some great reporting over the last couple days on the Rep. Jerry Lewis front, particularly on Lewis’s former staffer Letitia White.
Yesterday afternoon, 
Justin was the first to report that not long after leaving Lewis’s staff to become a lobbyist, White bought a house on Capitol Hill with one of the contractors who got earmarks from Lewis.
Then yesterday evening he was first to report that White and the defense contractor were using the house as the headquarters of a PAC, Small Biz Tech Political Action Committee, that took in a good amount of money but didn’t seem to give much of it back out in contributions.
And then late this morning, Justin was first to report that said iffy PAC is operated by Julia Willis-Leon, who just happens to be Rep. Lewis’s stepdaughter.
And then late this evening, the LA Times ran the developing story of Lewis-White-Willis-Leon lobbying operation as their own without mentioning that each of the key points was first reported by Rood.
When a reporter who writes for a ‘blog’ breaks stories with his own enterprise reporting, you should credit his work just as you would a reporter who works for a print publication.
Add the LATimes to the list of mainstream media publications poaching original reporting from TPMmuckraker.com.
Late Update: Regrettably, the San Diego Union-Tribune also has the story in tomorrow’s paper with no mention of the story first being broken at TPMmuckraker.com. That said, the byline is Jerry Kammer and Marcus Stern. Kammer’s done the best reporting on the Lewis/ Lowery syndicate, bar none And Stern broke the Cunningham story last June. So they’re both esteemed elders in the Duke-Wilkes-Lowery-Lewis corruption chronicling crowd as far as we’re concerned. We’ll even toss in a Mike-Myersesque ‘We’re not worthy.’
Another bipartisan milestone: Democrat and GOP lawmakers join together to ask a federal judge to declare the FBI’s raid on Rep. William Jefferson’s office unconstitutional. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.