Sesspool 2: The Tangled Web Unweaves

My friend and esteemed Keloland colleague, Doug Wiken, takes me to task for blogging on Offergate. He posted the following comment on by last blog:

Gosh, you guys are really, really short on serious issues. If you care about the wrong kind of influence in government, consider the number of lobbyists per congress member and the amount of money they dump into campaign coffers. A non-paying position is insignificant chicken feed, but may be the best the White House had to offer. In any case, they would have been better off not getting involved. It is really funny to find Republicans supporting a guy who may be able to defeat their Republican candidate and also be an actual Democrat instead of a pale copy of a mirror image of one.

I stated in my last post that I didn't think the root issue amounted to much. If it was illegal for the White House to offer Joe Sestak a job in exchange for dropping his senate bid, it probably shouldn't be.

It is not the crime but the cover-up that is now the issue. When Presidents lie, even about small things, it is probably best to know what the truth is and why they lied about it. This is especially true because Administrations of both flavors have an odd habit of turning the smallest of sins into a major crisis, with unfortunate consequences for the public business. When the Nixon Administration worried that the Democrats might have damaging information, they sent burglars into the DNC headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. We know how that turned out. I am not saying that there is any Watergate-level scandal here. I do think that paranoid behavior on the part of the Obama Administration is a legitimate topic for inquiring minds.

The Administration's current story is that they offered Joe Sestak a non-paying job on a "Senior Executive Branch Advisory Board", using scruples-challenged Bill Clinton as an intermediary. They did so, according to White House counsel Robert Bauer, in order to "avoid a divisive Senate primary, [and] allow him to retain his seat in the House."

I pointed out in my last post that it was highly implausible. It would be like saying to someone: "if you don't apply for that job that offers three times the pay and prestige, we will give you a blue ribbon!"

However, the supposed offer was worse than implausible. It was legally incoherent. Byron York at the Washington Examiner explains why. Apparently, President Clinton offered Sestak a position "on the President's Intelligence Advisory Board." The problem with that is that so long as Sestak was a member of Congress, he would be ineligible to serve on that board. Its members cannot be employed by the Federal Government.

I see two possibilities here. One is that the Administration tried to tempt Sestak with a job offer, but offered him something that they couldn't legally deliver. That would be mildly embarrassing, but benign. If true, the Administration could have shut down the story at the outset by admitting it.

The second possibility, now very likely, is that the Administration offered Sestak something else. That something else would have been a paid position, and that might amount to legal bribery. That alone would explain the months of stony silence and the recent lawyerly statements.

Bauer's statement is what we political scientists call a gross linguistic inexactitude, or in common speech, a big fat lie. Whether the Administration broke the law in their Clintonian dealings with Joe Sestak, I do not know. I do know that the Administration has a guilty conscience about what it did. In a Republic, sooner or later, the executive branch has to come clean. We aren't there yet.

Comments

[William]

The Obama administration is simply playing by "Chicago Rules" and discovering that even the ethical cesspool of DC has higher standards than they understand.

The corruption in Illinois politics is almost impossible for an outsider to grasp but it's the political environment that's "normal" for many in the current administration, including Obama.

BTW, "Blago's" trial starts this Thursday, should be an interesting (and educational) summer.

[BillW]

Over the past couple of days, not only the Washington Post, but the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Detroit Free Press, the Arizona Republic, the Cincinnati Enquirer the New York Times, Fox News, CNN, and the three networks have all seen fit to report and offer commentary about "offergate" - and those are just the ones I have seen. A guy from "Keloland" thinking it is not a "serious issue" might explain why he is a guy from Keloland.