Legacy of Shame

20 Forgotten Bush Scandals

In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, George H.W. Bush congratulated his son on running a “clean operation." (Daddy Bush) apparently wasn’t paying very close attention. Everyone remembers weapons of mass destruction, the US attorney firings. But historians will note that those are only the beginning of the Bush administration scandals…

The Bush administration will leave the annals of presidential disrepute several times thicker than it found them. There’s Iraq, the hospital visit to John Ashcroft, the US attorney firings. But historians will note that those are only the beginning of the Bush administration scandals. Does the name Jeff Gannon ring a bell? Boxgate? What about the anti-prostitution AIDS Tsar who purchased the services of—wait for it—the D.C. Madam?

The Daily Beast has put together 20 of Bush’s greatest forgotten scandals.

Sex and Shoplifting

1) In March 2006, Claude Allen, Bush's top domestic policy aide, was arrested when he tried to return items he had shoplifted from Target for cash refunds. Allen, who made $161,000 a year, blamed stress from Hurricane Katrina.

2) In 2005, bloggers pricked up their ears when a reporter named Jeff Gannon asked a softball question at a Bush press conference. Some sleuthing turned up nude photos of Gannon—real name: James Guckert—on male escort websites.

3) Randall Tobias, Bush’s AIDS tsar, mandated that organizations must oppose prostitution in order to receive American aid. It later emerged that Tobias purchased services through the notorious D.C. Madam, though Tobias maintained he only bought “massages.”

4) The Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service would not seem to be the sexiest government agency. But a departmental investigation last year found that officials had “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”

Where’d the Money Go?

5) When testifying before Congress in 2007, L. Paul Bremer, the former head of reconstruction in Iraq, was unable to account for as much as $12 billion—about half of his budget—as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority between May 2003 and June 2004. According to a report by Rep. Henry Waxman, contractors brought bags to meetings in order to collect shrink-wrapped bundles of money.

6) In 2004, Pentagon auditors found that Halliburton had not adequately accounted for $1.8 billion of the bill it sent to the United States government for its work in Iraq and Kuwait.

7) Also that year, Bunnatine Greenhouse, the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting officer, charged that KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary, unfairly received billions of dollars worth of no-bid contracts in Iraq. Greenhouse was demoted in 2005.

Disappearances

8) In 2002, Canadian citizen Maher Arar was detained at an airport in New York and spirited away to Syria, where he was tortured and held for 10 months by his captors before being returned home. Canadian officials investigated Arar's case, declared he was innocent, and paid him $9 million in compensation. American officials refused to admit the mistake and instead kept Arar on a terrorist watch list.

9) Army Captain James Yee, a Muslim chaplain in Guantanamo Bay, was hooded, shackled, and detained in solitary confinement for 76 days on charges of espionage. Within a year the case against Yee had collapsed and the Army tried to save face by charging him with hoarding pornography.

All the President’s Wordsmiths

10) In an email to friends, Danielle Crittenden, the wife of White House speechwriter David Frum, bragged that her husband had written Bush’s famous “Axis of Evil” line. The e-mail leaked to Slate, causing a minor scandal.

11) Part of the self-created mythology of White House speechwriter Michael Gerson was that he composed his speeches in longhand. But as fellow scribe Matthew Scully later noted: “At the precise moment when the State of the Union address was being drafted at the White House by John [McConnell] and me, Mike was off pretending to craft the State of the Union in longhand for the benefit of a reporter.”

Ron Edmonds/AP

No Administration Friend Left Behind

12) First there was Columnist Gate: In 2005, USA Today reported that conservative commentator Armstrong Williams received a $240,000 contract from the Department of Education to promote No Child Left Behind on his television show and to sell other African-American journalists on the legislation. Later, The Washington Post uncovered a similar deal with columnist Maggie Gallagher to promote a marriage initiative for the Department of Health.

13) A Defense Department report in 2006 urged the military to end its practice of paying Iraqi journalists to publish pro-American stories in their newspapers, arguing the tactic would "undermine the concept of a free press."

14) According to The New York Times, Karl Rove scored lobbyist Ralph Reed a lucrative contract with Enron in 1997 to gain his support in the 2000 presidential race.

15) David Safavian, the former chief of staff of the General Services Administration, was convicted of helping Jack Abramoff on a shady land deal as well as concealing a "lavish weeklong golf trip" paid for by Abramoff.

16) As head of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz was forced to resign in disgrace after he helped his "female companion," Shaha Riza, score a $60,000 pay raise and promotion—and then tried to cover it up.

Down the Memory Hole

17) Bush fundraiser Lurita Doan's gig as chair of the General Services Administration went down in flames when she was accused of asking agency staff to help Republican candidates win elections. Doan denied any wrongdoing. When witnesses said she asked her staff at a meeting, "How can we use GSA to help our candidates in the next election?" Doan claimed she had no memory of the presentation.

18) Though Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, was suspected of being the anthrax mailer, that didn't keep Bush and Cheney from openly speculating that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks and even going so far as to pressure FBI officials to come up with a bin Laden connection, according to the New York Daily News.

Mission Accomplished

19) In 2003, Bush went to a warehouse in St. Louis to give a speech titled “Strengthening America’s Economy.” But the boxes laid out before the presidential podium bore the label "Made in China." The labels were then obscured with white paper. The White House blamed an "overzealous advance volunteer.”

The Last Word

20) The administration ethos was nicely summarized during the investigation in the firing of US attorneys, in a testy exchange between former White House Political Director Sara Taylor and Sen. Patrick Leahy. Taylor: "I took an oath to the president…And I believe that taking that oath means that I need to respect, and do respect, my service to the president."

Leahy: "No, the oath says that you take an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States. That is your paramount duty. I know that the president refers to the government being his government—it's not."

Source The Daily Beast

The Judge and the Drug Dealer

My longstanding antipathy to Judge Michael Conahan is well known, from insinuations of illegal and unethical behavior to a cavalier disregard for the law and concept of Justice. I also have an issue with the tidy little deal he gave Cobra Video's owner and gay Pornographer Bryan Kocis in 2002.

After Kocis was charged with rape,molestation of a 15 yo and filming of gay child pornography Conahan "reviewed" hundreds of hours of footage and declared all the boys in the video were of age. He refused to allow outside review of the video by Federal experts.
He allowed Kocis to accept a deal of one year probation, with no jail time and a refusal to require that Kocis register as a sex offender.

Perverted Justice if you ask me!

Luzerne County Judge in business with ex-con?

By
BY DAVE JANOSKI
STAFF WRITER

Published: Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Updated: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 1:00 AM EDT

WILKES-BARRE — Fourteen years ago, Luzerne County Judge Michael T. Conahan said allegations that he helped connect a Florida cocaine dealer with a Hazleton buyer were “bogus” stories told by “common criminals” hoping to curry favor with federal prosecutors.

Four years ago, the convicted cocaine dealer and Judge Conahan’s wife, Barbara, formed a Pompano Beach used-car business, according to an official with the company who said Monday that he met with Judge Conahan, the judge’s wife and the former dealer in Florida to discuss setting up the business in 2004.

Barbara Conahan was president of the used-car business, RAB Auto Sales Inc., according to Florida corporate documents. The former drug dealer, Ronald Belletiere, operated RAB, according to the company’s former secretary/treasurer. Florida documents indicate the company has been inactive since September 2007.

Former RAB secretary/treasurer Charles Rebhan said in a phone interview Monday that Mr. Belletiere approached him in 2004 to help set up a business that would buy used cars at auctions for resale.

Mr. Rebhan, who spent more than four decades in car sales, had previously worked with Mr. Belletiere at a Florida dealership. In spring or summer 2004, Mr. Belletiere set up a lunch meeting with Judge Conahan, his wife and Mr. Rebhan in Florida, where they discussed how the business would be set up and operated, Mr. Rebhan said.

Judge Conahan, whose financial dealings are being examined by federal agents conducting a probe of the county court, and his wife did not return phone messages seeking comment Tuesday.

Judge Conahan’s name surfaced during Mr. Belletiere’s 1991 federal trial in the “Empire” drug case involving cocaine trafficking in Hazleton in the 1980s, when Judge Conahan was a magisterial district judge in the city.

Government witness Neal DeAngelo testified Judge Conahan called him in 1986 and said he had heard Mr. DeAngelo’s brother, Paul, had been buying cocaine from a dealer who was under investigation. Judge Conahan offered to put the DeAngelos in contact with a Florida dealer, Mr. DeAngelo testified.

Mr. Belletiere, who is a former Hazleton resident, subsequently called Mr. DeAngelo at Judge Conahan’s request, according to testimony, and the DeAngelo brothers and another man traveled to Miami to buy $26,500 worth of cocaine from Mr. Belletiere.

Judge Conahan was on the prosecution’s list of witnesses for the Belletiere trial but was not called to testify. The federal prosecutor in the case, during a “sidebar” conversation with the judge out of the jury’s earshot, called Judge Conahan an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the case, according to a transcript.

In August 1994, Judge Conahan held a press conference to deny he had referred Mr. Belletiere to the DeAngelos, but he acknowledged knowing all three men, having represented their families in legal matters.

In a 2003 interview, Judge Conahan said he was exonerated by the Judicial Conduct Board, which has never commented publicly on the case. The board’s chief counsel, Joseph Massa Jr., said the board does not comment on investigations that do not lead to public charges.

Paul DeAngelo and Mr. Belletiere received reduced prison sentences in the “Empire” case upon the recommendation of federal prosecutors. Both were released in 1995. Neal DeAngelo was never charged.

The DeAngelo brothers, who operate DBi Services, which provides commercial services, including vegetation and road management, to government and business clients nationwide from its headquarters in Hazleton, did not respond to an interview request Tuesday.

Mr. Belletiere, 53, who lives in south Florida, did not respond to an interview request made through his daughter, Briana. She acknowledged her father had operated RAB Auto Sales Inc., but believed the company is no longer active.

Judge Conahan listed RAB Auto Sales on his annual financial disclosure forms filed with the state Supreme Court for 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Judge Conahan, who was president judge from 2002 through 2006, announced his retirement last year at age 56 although he had six years left on his second 10-year term. He is now a senior judge primarily overseeing the county’s Drug Treatment Court.

source The Scranton Times Tribune