Which part, JD accepting money from Abramov, putting his wife in a sham job, or him being 21 points behind.
Hell, I left out the part where he lost a republican district to Harry Mitchell.
Here are the simple facts:
Abramoff contributed a grand total of $2,250 dollars to my political efforts. ($250 in 1996, $1,000 in 1998, and $1,000 to our leadership political action committee, TEAMPAC, in 1999.)
I never met with Abramoff concerning any legislation.
He never came to my office.
He never lobbied me directly on any issue.
Once Abramoff’s troubling activities were revealed, we donated that money to charity (Hurricane Katrina relief). Simply put, we didn’t want it.
Please understand, the Indian tribes were the true targets of Abramoff, I was simply collateral damage. The tribes were his clients and they were defrauded of tens of millions of dollars. Our office offered to return their contributions to them, but tribal officials stepped up to the plate and stated for the record that they themselves had made their own determinations about who they would support with political donations.
In the meantime, we cooperated fully with the Department of Justice, and hopefully our efforts helped in the indictment and conviction of Abramoff. Of course, we will never know that for certain. What we do know is that he is currently incarcerated for defrauding the Indian tribes, conspiracy, and corruption of public officials.
These days, ‘cooperation’ is expensive. Very expensive. In our case, it involved retaining a K Street Law Firm to pore over twelve years worth of my congressional records and correspondance. Twelve years of household records is bad enough, but Congress runs on paper and e-mails, and it was literally thousands of pages and hundreds of computer records that had to be examined, evaluated, and sometimes redacted for security reasons. Then you can add the administrative costs, phone calls, and ‘face time’ the attorneys spent with the DOJ. When all was said and done, the legal bill was over a half a million dollars. And that was to ‘cooperate’ with the DOJ!
In the end, we were completely vindicated. In a letter from our attorneys, they informed us that the Department of Justice had advised us that we “are not now the target, subject or focus [of] any DOJ investigation, case or other proceeding.” Essentially, it was a complete and total vindication that we had done nothing wrong at all - which is exactly what we had been saying all along.
**************************************
Interviewer: “What about that $100,000 you supposedly paid to your wife?”
JD: “My wife Mary was an employee of TEAMPAC, and she received a monthly paycheck. Simple math takes the “oomph” out of this charge. Think of it this way: if someone is paid $20,000 annually for five years, that totals $100,000! Pretty cheap for office help. Also, these were not taxpayer funds!”
http://www.fittrust.org/
Which part, JD accepting money from Abramov, putting his wife in a sham job, or him being 21 points behind. Hell, I left out the part where he lost a republican district to Harry Mitchell.
Hayworth still beats the alternative.
I will be sending a modest donation tomorrow to Mr. Hayworth from my increasingly small stash of money.
It is worth it after all to relieve this country of Juan McCainiac.
“Which part, JD accepting money from Abramov, putting his wife in a sham job, or him being 21 points behind.
Hell, I left out the part where he lost a republican district to Harry Mitchell.”
If all that were true, which it isn’t as you well know, J. D. would STILL be 10 times better and 10 times more conservative than McCain.
Indians, Lobbyists and Arizona Politics...OH MY!
http://towncriernews.blogspot.com/
Note: The Arizona Republic is in McCain's back pocket along with most of the Arizona State-run media.
UPDATED: Text of 'Blackmail' E-mail Included
Former Congressman JD Hayworth is reportedly considering a primary challenge to John McCain. In explaining his rationale recently, he made a serious allegation about McCain’s loyalty to party:
Hayworth charged that in 2005 Salter tried to “blackmail” him into stopping his public criticism of McCain’s comprehensive immigration-reform bill. Hayworth said his chief of staff got an e-mail from Salter indicating that McCain might retaliate by commenting in the media about Hayworth’s links to the then-unfolding Jack Abramoff lobbyist corruption scandal.
Hayworth further suggested that Salter was responsible for planting false information in the Washington Times that said Hayworth was the “target” of an Abramoff-related Justice Department investigation. The Abramoff scandal helped Democrat Harry Mitchell upset Hayworth in 2006.
“Now do I know for a fact that Mark Salter was that unnamed source? No, I don’t,” Hayworth told his listeners. “But could a reasonable person connect the dots after, to be polite you could call it a threat, to be more realistic you could call it a threat of blackmail, in that memorandum?”
Sater denies the charge, but both he and McCain have been known for a shoot-from-the-hip style, and a willingness to alienate GOP colleagues. McCain in particular has been prone to explode when dealing with Republican opponents of his immigration reform ideas. Would it really be a surprise if the man who considered a party switch in 2001, and who contemplated becoming Kerry’s vice presidential candidate in 2004, and who attacked Republican colleagues over immigration - had also threatened a Republican colleague over it?Hayworth was a solid conservative who held a GOP-leaning seat for 12 years. He was ultimately cleared by the Department of Justice in December, 2007 - slightly more than a year after he was defeated for re-election, largely because of questions regarding his supposed ‘links’ to Abramoff.
If McCain contributed to that narrow loss, he ought to answer for it.
Update: It’s come to my attention that JD Hayworth has previously published the text of the E-mail his Chief of Staff received from McCain aide Mark Salter. Judge for yourself if McCain was trying to blackmail Hayworth:
As you can guess, much consternation over here about your boss’s quick attack on a bill [ the McCain-Kennedy Amnesty Bill] we’ve been working on for months, in the most arduous discussions, and we think, managed to arrive at a very good product with a broad constituency behind it, not to mention three of your boss’ delegation members.
Obviously, the attack occurred before anyone has even seen the bill. At best, it was discourteous, and we took it quite personally.
FYI: We’ve been inundated with press requests to comment on your boss’s Abrahamoff, sky box, etc. situation. We’ve refused them. I think you should be prepared for that to change.
Salter says after he sent this E-mail, he got an angry E-mail back and ‘that was the end of it.’ A news search shows that stories about Hayworth and Abramoff increased significantly after this point, but that doesn’t prove anything.
http://www.redstate.com/brianfaughnan/2009/10/12/did-mccain-torpedo-jd-hayworth/
Read the following link for a good description of how JD was robbed.
http://www.espressopundit.com/2008/03/post-1.htmlThe cost of prosecutors ignoring the "basic rules of fairness" is even higher when the target is an elected official and his opponents suddenly perceive him a vulnerable. The classic example is JD Hayworth
For an example of how it works, lets start with this March 2006 Republic article.
The national Democratic Party is shopping for a big name to oppose Rep. J.D. Hayworth in Arizona's 5th Congressional District this fall, suggesting that the six-term Republican is vulnerable in the wake of a Capitol Hill lobbying scandal to which he has been linked.
"Linked" is such a great word. The word allows the media to claim a connection without actually saying that the elected official is being "investigated" or being "charged." As Kevin Bacon will tell you, there is no way to claim that you are not "linked" to something.
The article makes it clear that the Democratic Party recruited Mitchell because of the "linkage" and the subsequent story.
Hayworth's Chief of Staff was adamant from the beginning that there was no truth to the story.
Eule said Hayworth never has been contacted by investigators, and Eule dismissed the Times story as "totally wrong."
He also had a prediction.
"By the time the election comes around, it will be proved that what Mr. Hayworth said is correct, that he did nothing wrong, that the charges are bogus," Eule said.
