Now that’s loyalty.
When a top supporter gets busted by the Feds for allegedly running a massive Ponzi scheme, most big-time pols are usually pretty quick to distance themselves. (See Crist, Charlie, for the locus classicus of the genre).
Not Pete Sessions though. Hours after Allen Stanford was charged by the SEC for swindling investors out of around $7 billion, the Texas congressman, and chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, sent the following email, signed “Pete”:
I love you and believe in you…If you want my ear/voice — e-mail.
The message, sent at 11:31 a.m. on February 17, was obtained by McClatchy, which reports, without citing sources, that the Justice Department has launched an investigation into whether Sessions and numerous other lawmakers who received campaign funds or lavish Caribbean trips from Stanford did him any special favors in return.
[FOR A SLIDE-SHOW OF PICTURES OF ONE CARIBBEAN JUNKET ORGANIZED BY STANFORD FOR LAWMAKERS, CLICK HERE]
As we noted earlier this year, in 2001 Stanford lobbied successfully to kill a bill that would have helped crack down on offshore tax havens, and might have led to the exposure of his alleged Antigua-based scam.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Late Update: A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.
Late Late Update: Sessions’s office is out with a statement on the issue.
