Free Republic

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is facing mounting pressure to intervene in an intense dispute between an outside ethics office she pushed through the House and the full ethics committee. The stakes are high for the future of the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), a new entity Democrats created to help police lawmakers. Its board members and top staff are threatening to resign if the ethics committee doesn’t meet a deadline the OCE believes is critical to its role, according to several sources within the ethics community. Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami said the Speaker believes cooler heads will prevail and the...

A source close to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now confirms that Pelosi was told in February 2003 by her intelligence aide, Michael Sheehy, that waterboarding was actually used on CIA detainee Abu Zubaydah. ... This appears to contradict Pelosi's account that she was never told waterboarding actually happened, only that the administration was considering using it.... Some Republicans have called for Pelosi to testify at congressional hearings. The number two House Democrat -- Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland -- said Tuesday, "I think the facts need to get out" regarding what members of Congress had been told about harsh interrogations....

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders are “concerned” by a widening criminal probe that may involve Rep. John P. Murtha, but sources close to the leadership say there’s no move afoot to force him out as chairman of the powerful Defense Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. “We are watching to see what happens,” said a senior House Democratic aide. “At this point, there is nothing for us to do. There is not a clear indication yet that Mr. Murtha has done anything wrong or that the Justice Department is targeting him in any way, so there is...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has directed nearly $100,000 from her political action committee to her husband's real estate and investment firm over the past decade, a practice of paying a spouse with political donations that she voted to ban last year. Financial Leasing Services Inc. (FLS), owned by Paul F. Pelosi, has received $99,000 in rent, utilities and accounting fees from the speaker's "PAC to the Future" over the PAC's nine-year history.

MORGAN CITY, La. (AP) — A member of the Louisiana Democratic Party's central committee has been arrested by federal agents who accused him of harboring aliens, his defense attorney said Wednesday. Lenny Dartez, the husband of state Rep. Carla Dartez, a Democrat representing the Morgan City area, was taken into custody Tuesday at his business, said Dartez's attorney, Mike Skinner. Dartez employs labor crews in the area, Skinner said. Dartez was named in a federal complaint issued by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and taken to a federal magistrate in Lafayette, who released him on his own recognizance, Skinner said. been...

San Francisco - -- (09-25) 16:15 PDT SAN FRANCISCO - San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom suspended Supervisor Ed Jew today for alleged official misconduct, began proceedings to remove him from office and named a 29-year-old political novice to take his place. Jew was served this morning with a seven-page outline of charges at the Canton Flower Shop he owns on Waverly Place in Chinatown. The document, drawn up by the city attorney's office and signed by Newsom, accuses the rookie supervisor of misconduct for allegedly lying when he said he lived in District 4 in the Sunset and takes note...

Norman Hsu was politician's dream who became a nightmare. He knew people, hosted fundraisers, solicited donations. And he was an unabashed fan of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Now in disgrace, his role as one of Clinton's top money bundlers will dog him and her presidential campaign while law enforcement authorities investigate his business and political dealings. Eager to sever her links to Hsu, the Clinton campaign this week returned $850,000 in contributions linked to his fundraising activities. But Hsu's troubles aren't over and the spotlight on his political connections won't recede easily. Hsu is the latest poster boy for rogue fundraising,...

Two state lawmakers accused of accepting bribes for political favors have officially resigned from the Assembly. Alfred Steele, D-Passaic, and Mims Hackett, D-Essex, both sent letters Monday to the Assembly’s clerk saying they would formally step down. Steele, Hackett and nine other public officials -- including Passaic Mayor Samuel “Sammy” Rivera -- were arrested on influence-peddling charges last week following an 18-month FBI corruption sting. All remain free on $200,000 bail. The government alleges Steele, who is also county undersheriff and a Baptist minister in Paterson, accepted $14,000 in exchange for his promotion of a phony insurance firm set up...

A former candidate for political office in Nassau County was arrested Friday and charged with criminal sexual activity. Keith Lamar Sawyer, 44, 85064 Art Wilson Road in Yulee, was accused of seeking a sexual en-counter with an underage teenage girl. He was taken to Nassau County Jail and charged with solicitation of a minor for lewd and lascivious battery and lewd and lascivious conduct. Sawyer, a Democrat, has unsuccessfully sought election to various county offices, including the Nassau County Ocean Highway & Port Authority in 2006 - he lost to the late Ed Gandy that November - and to the...

Report: Briley finished drink at gunpoint after 100 mph chase -- Republican leaders are calling for state Rep. Rob Briley to resign after his arrest for drunken driving over the weekend, a move House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh called “pretty lowlife.” A heavily intoxicated State Rep. Rob Briley, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, fled the scene of an accident in DeKalb County on Saturday afternoon, then led police in Wilson County on a 100-mile-an-hour chase before finally stopping, according to police reports and court documents. The Nashville Democrat was arrested at gunpoint after stopping his SUV in the middle of...

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards recently defended taking a lucrative book contract from a publisher controlled by Rupert Murdoch -- whose News Corp. empire Edwards has sharply criticized -- by insisting that “every dime” of his $500,000 advance went to charity. Left unmentioned by Edwards, however, was that Murdoch’s HarperCollins paid portions of a $300,000 expense budget for the book to Edwards’s daughter and to a senior political aide, Jonathan Prince. The sums paid to Cate Edwards and Prince, who are listed as co-authors on the little-noticed 2006 coffee table book, "Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives," have not been...

BALTIMORE - Former state Sen. Thomas Bromwell, a powerful figure in Annapolis during his nearly 20 years in the legislature, has agreed to plead guilty to taking bribes from a construction company executive, his attorney said Friday. Bromwell, 58, will plead guilty to racketeering conspiracy and filing a false tax return, said attorney Barry Pollack. Sentencing guidelines call for a prison term of about 6 1/2 years to 8 years for the former Senate Finance Committee chairman, Pollack said. "It was a very difficult decision for him, but taking into account what's best for him, what's best for his wife,...

More than six years after the Clintons left the White House, nearly half of the respondents in a new poll -- 45 percent -- worry that if they return, they could bring "high levels of corruption" with them. A Zogby International poll released Thursday in Washington highlights in particular concerns about former President Bill Clinton's ability to "behave honestly in the White House" if his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), is elected president in 2008. The poll results indicate that scandals which dogged the Clinton administration remain relevant to a significant number of voters. The 45 percent figure would likely...

Early this morning on JOM we went through the cached page blog and noticed something interesting. The cached pages we examined indicate that the mother of one of the pages, Robin Katsoros, mother of Christopher Katsoros a former Pelosi page, told the pages she was working on a screen production of the lives of pages. And she gathered information from them. She is a Conyers and Kerry supporter and he is a student at Georgetown now. It looks like the kids were trying to “sex” up their experiences to get her interested. Here are some bits of it. JOM has...

BUSH’S FREEDOM SPREAD CONTINUES J. Grant Swank, Jr. It started with Operation Iraqi Freedom a little over two years ago. Now the freedom spread continues. The democracy planting dream was initiated by the United States President George W. Bush. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld oversaw the three-week-win war in New Iraq. Since then, other countries have reached out to plant a democracy. Previous despots are now bending in the direction of the populace liberty. According to Scott Wilson and Daniel Williams in today’s Washington Post Foreign Service report, "Advocates for democracy begin to taste success after years of fruitless effort....