Clean Government

According to the LA Times, Todd Palin spent quite a bit of time representing his wife in various matters, especially when it came to trying to get his ex-brother-in-law fired.  Troopergate is getting more and more interesting.

Sarah Palin, who is officially the Governor of Alaska and fancies herself as a government reformer, continues to question Barack Obama’s ties to a domestic terrorist when he was eight years old.  Yet both she and her husband failed to cooperate with a bi-partisan ethics investigation of Troopergate, after initially promising their cooperation.  Apparently this was done with good reason, since the investigation concluded that she had abused her power as governor.

But did she really?  According to the investigation, it was Todd Palin who initially contacted Trooper Wooten’s boss, Walt Monegan and continued to pressure him to fire Wooten.  He also was a regular attendee at cabinet meetings and involved in high-level discussions with police unions, mining interests, Native American issues, and even the privatization of a dairy near the Palins’ hometown of Wasilla.

Maybe Sarah Palin didn’t abuse her power because Todd Palin is really in charge.  Either that, or she is far from being the government ethics reformer she likes to portray herself as.

By CREW on Executive Branch corruption

Speaker Nancy Pelosi thinks the executive branch ethics rules need to be fixed:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for tighter ethics rules in federal agencies Wednesday after government officials approved the purchase of a $980,000 vacation home by a top Justice Department lawyer with an oil company lobbyist.

Pelosi’s criticism followed an Associated Press report last week that department ethics officials did not object when Sue Ellen Wooldridge, then head of the environment division, was buying a South Carolina beach house with Donald R. Duncan, the top Washington lobbyist for ConocoPhillips.

“If in fact Ms. Wooldridge got such a pass from the ethics committee of the executive branch, then certainly the executive branch ethics process needs a look as well,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said when asked about the house purchase at a San Francisco news conference.

Nine months after the purchase, Wooldridge approved an agreement that allowed ConocoPhillips an extension of pollution cleanup requirements at some of the company’s refineries. The company says Duncan was not part of those negotiations.

It’s almost as if people in the executive branch can’t police themselves so Congress needs to step in.

More from Marketplace on loopholes in the new House Ethics rules (you can also listen to the piece at that link). In this report, Marketplace takes a look at the provision that allows political action committees (PAC) to pay for travel with lobbyists:

This is the way the leadership PAC loophole works: Hoyer’s guests give thousands of dollars to his PAC. Because there are few restrictions on how PAC money can be spent, Hoyer’s PAC uses some of the cash to pay for the congressman’s trip to Puerto Rico. The PAC also provides entertainment, golf, even nifty little gifts bags for all the guests.

The lobbyists and donors who have supplied the cash for this party then pay their own way to Puerto Rico. And in return for their generosity, they get to golf and hang with the congressman in the Caribbean.

Hoyer’s PAC has booked 137 rooms for his May event. Lobbyists who didn’t want to be named tell us it will be a blast.

It may not look good, but it is legal, and well within congressional ethics rules.

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Eight ethics training sessions apparently didn’t have quite the desired impact on former CIA official Kyle “Dusty” Foggo.  The Politico has the details on Foggo’s prominent ethics role at the agency:

The high-ranking CIA official accused of steering contracts to a childhood friend once oversaw ethics at the agency, according to federal charging papers.

The case against Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, whose indictment is linked to the investigation that landed former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, R-Calif., in prison, has embarrassed the CIA. And it comes when Democrats, now holding a majority in Congress, are working to make good on campaign promises to eradicate the specter of corruption that they charged hung over the Republican-controlled Congress and the Bush administration.

Foggo, who retired last year as the third-ranking CIA official, served two years as a “deputy ethics official” and sat through ethics training eight times, according to the federal grand jury indictment handed down last week in San Diego. But Foggo covered up gifts and a job offer he received from his alleged co-conspirator, the indictment asserts. And it quotes an e-mail in which he seems to suggest ethics reporting requirements are burdensome.

WASHINGTON – The Interior Department has “a culture replete with a lack of accountability” and at least a half-dozen major management problems that have festered for years, federal officials testified Friday.

The department faces “enormous challenges in several areas,” Inspector General Earl Devaney said at an oversight hearing of the House Natural Resources Committee.

In the past two years alone, Devaney’s office has uncovered golf outings, dinners, hunting trips, concert tickets and box seats at sporting events being accepted against the rules by Interior officials. They have also uncovered exclusive access and special favors by Interior employees to select outside groups.

Full story… 

Rumors continue to swirl in Washington (San Francisco Chronicle columnist David Lazurus and the Consumer Affairs site have detailed entries), about the possible appointment of industry lobbyist Michael Baroody to the vacant chairmanship of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). As far as we know, the Senate has not even received a nomination, so the notion of a stealth recess appointment of an industry lobbyist to a consumer job is insulting to that body. But then again, Bush’s abject failure to make either a timely or consumer-oriented nomination is a demonstrable failure to the American people. Since the agency has had no chairman for six months, under its rules it no longer has a quorum to conduct business, including to impose penalties on wrongdoers. This week, Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) moved a bill through Senate Commerce to fix that problem, but it is not yet law. We don’t have an official position on the non-nomination of Michael Baroody of the National Association of Manufacturers to chair the nation’s consumer product agency, but we are certainly not impressed that the President thinks he can sneak an industry lobbyist in on Lincoln’s Birthday. We can easily think of a half-dozen consumer advocates who could and should fill the job. Our previous blog on the departure of former Chairman Hal Stratton.

U.S. Reps. George Miller (D-CA), the chair of the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor, and Barney Frank (D-MA), the chair of the Financial Services Committee, have sent President Bush’s counsel Fred Fielding a letter asking whether Sallie Mae chief Albert Lord’s sale of 400,000 shares of stock just 3 days before the budget announcement, and therefore four days before the stock price tanked, may have benefited from communications from the White House:

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is planning to move legislation that would place strict ethics limits on executive-branch officials, going further than the ethics reforms the lower chamber adopted for itself last month.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and a close ally of Pelosi’s, is scheduled to hold a hearing on the legislation today and plans to mark it up in committee tomorrow.

Several of the proposed reforms in the measure appear to be in response to various controversies that have emerged during President Bush’s tenure, ranging from a dispute over a secret energy task force to criticism over paying pundits for favorable reviews.

Full story…