Longtime reader checking in on latest Schlozman findings:
So Justice managed to interview more than 120 people, review 200,000 e-mails, and sift through mountains of documents in less than a year, but it took six full months for someone at the DC US Attorney’s Office to decide not to prosecute?
This decision stinks in three ways:
(1) No one is taking responsibility for it. We know who didn’t make the decision, but not who did. That’s more than a little unusual – there’s generally a rush to identify the impeccably credentialed career prosecutor who made the decision, to avert charges of political bias.
(2) It was announced less than two weeks before the new administration takes office. Sitting on the report for this long prevented electoral embarrassment; releasing it now prevents the new administration from cleaning house.
(3) As best I can tell, no one consulted Congress. The IG found that Schlozman had lied to Congress. That finding ought to have been reported to the relevant committees, which would then have been able to refer the matter to the DC USA for prosecution. Instead, the USA’s office reached its own decision, and then authorized the release of the findings. If Congress refers it back to the USA, it would now have to overturn its own previous decision. That short-circuits the process and undermines Congressional authority.
I hope you’ve got a call in to Senate Judiciary – Pat Leahy is usually good for a nicely outraged quote, and I imagine Kennedy is none too pleased. But really, I’m curious about what they’ll do. The man sat there and lied to them, which is a crime – are they going to press for prosecution?
Our reporter Zack Roth is on a conference call with Leahy now regarding the Holder nomination. We’re going to try to get a question in on Schlozman.
Schlozman lawyer: DOJ inspector general guilty of “extraordinary bias and lack of ethical and legal standards.”
The big talk up the Hill at the moment is whether some energy tax rebates will be refundable or not. Really thin gruel. An interesting fight between the senate Democrats and the incoming administration. But perhaps best characterized as somewhere between a drop in the bucket and 7/8 drop in the bucket in terms of major investments in new green technologies that could lay the groundwork for future economic growth, real progress on global warming and real progress shifting our reliance from the toxic encumbrance of oil.
Meanwhile, though, there are some kernels of more ambitious ideas. Rep. Van Hollen (D-MD) and Zach Wamp (R-TN) sent a letter to the president-elect Obama about so-called ‘Green Banks’, specifically something called the National Clean Energy Lending Authority. The idea is a government chartered authority which would be empowered and funded to do a certain amount of lending to green projects but also, and perhaps more significantly, issue government guarantees that would make it easier and cheaper for green projects to get funded in the private sector.
As the two write in their letter, “The current financial crisis has not only thrown us into recession, it has significantly derailed or killed off virtually every alternative energy project in the pipeline making renewable energy yet another victim of the economic fallout.”
From a footnote to the IG’s report on the politicization of the Civil Rights Division at DOJ:
In that incident in August 2004, Voting Section Chief John Tanner sent an e-mail to Schlozman asking Schlozman to bring coffee for him to a meeting both were scheduled to attend. Schlozman replied asking Tanner how he liked his coffee.
Tanner’s response was, “Mary Frances Berry style – black and bitter.” Berry is an
African-American who was the Chairperson of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from November 1993 until late 2004. Schlozman forwarded the e-mail chain to several Department officials (including Principal DAAG Bradshaw) but not Acosta, with the comment, “Y’all will appreciate Tanner’s response.”
Tanner, whose disastrous tenure in the Voting Section we chronicled extensively at TPMmuckraker, was canned not long after claiming that voter ID laws have a disproportionate impact on the elderly and therefore could not have an adverse impact on minority voters: “Minorities don’t become elderly the way white people do: They die first.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in DC explains to TPMmuckraker who looked at the Schlozman case and when prosecution was declined.
It’s a Bernie Madoff meets D.B. Cooper moment:
The Indiana investment advisor being hunted by federal authorities two days after he jumped out of a plane and disappeared has been charged with two counts of securities violations.
Marcus Schrenker, 38, now faces two counts of acting as an investment advisor after his license expired on Dec. 31, according to documents provided by Indiana Secretary of State’s Office spokesman Jim Gavin.
Gavin told ABCNews.com that a Hamilton County Superior Court judge froze Marcus Schrenker’s assets and those of his wife late yesterday. Schrenker parachuted out of his company-owned plane over Alabama Sunday while the plane continued flying on autopilot before crashing into Florida swampland two hours later.
Seems like Sen. Schumer (D) looks pretty business as usual on the major green/infrastructure front, while Sen. Kerry (D), also on the Finance Committee, may be inclined to be more bold.
On another front, we noted yesterday that Sen. Levin (D) had gotten the TARP office at Treasury (the people running the bailout) to release the contracts governing the investment of the TARP money. In other words, these contracts contain the terms on which the money was given to the banks — and which would tell us a lot about whether it was given on terms that hold any real hope of every getting the money back.
But it turns out that Levin apparently had to agree not to release the documents to the public.
Late Update: Turns out there’s a bit of a mystery here. An unnamed Levin aide told the Times that they did not plan to make the contracts public. But when we talked to Levin earlier today, it seemed to be the first he’d heard of the idea of not releasing the documents publicly — he seemed to assume that they would be releasing them publicly. So we’re still trying to figure out just what’s up with that.
Treasury Secretary nominee Tim Geithner may have a “nanny” problem — although in this case it’s a housekeeper, the WSJ reports. A separate and unrelated unpaid taxes issue, too, though I can’t tell if that’s peculiar to his having worked at the IMF. In any event, members of the Senate Finance Committee are meeting in Chairman Baucus’ office this afternoon to “air” the issue.
Following the news that the DOJ IG found that arch-bamboozler Bradley Schlozman lied to Congress about his actions while serving at DOJ, a number of readers have written to say: Okay, fine, so he’s not being prosecuted. But isn’t there even some movement to disbar the guy since he’s back out practicing law?
Well, we called up the state official who handles this stuff in the state of Kansas where the Schloz is now practicing and where he holds his law license. That’s the disciplinary administrator for the State of Kansas, Stanton Hazlett. And he says that at least as of today no one has filed any complaints with them regarding Schlozman’s conduct and apparently perjurious behavior.