WASHINGTON – A House panel has subpoenaed documents that lawmakers say could shed new light on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's role in Bank of America's acquisition of Merrill Lynch.
The subpoena comes ahead of a hearing next week in which Bernanke is scheduled to testify.
Lawmakers have accused Bernanke and President Bush's treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, of pressuring Bank of America Corp. Chief Executive Kenneth Lewis into the deal and urging him to keep quiet about Merrill's financial problems.
Not divulging that information would have violated Lewis' fiduciary duty to the bank's shareholders.
Lawmakers also have questioned whether Lewis threatened not to go through with the merger in order to squeeze money from the government.
The arbitrator says the illegal overtime practices are "ongoing." However, there are mitigating circumstances - namely, that BushCo cut agency resources to the bone (they've lost 25 percent of their staff in the past eight years). Apparently job discrimination wasn't all that big a priority under Bush:
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, responsible for ensuring that the nation's workers are treated fairly, has itself willfully violated the Fair Labor Standards Act on a nationwide basis with its own employees, an arbitrator has ruled.
The agency's practice of offering compensatory time off to its employees rather than overtime pay amounted to "forced volunteering" and was a knowing violation of the law, according to the ruling.
"The case before me, in my view, demonstrates action that went beyond mere negligence," arbitrator Steven M. Wolf wrote in a decision released last week.
The union representing EEOC employees said the decision lends credence to its frequent complaint that the agency is undermanned and its staff is overworked.
"This overtime ruling against the EEOC is vindication that the 'model employer' should not be exploiting the dedication of its hardworking employees," Gabrielle Martin, president of the National Council of EEOC Locals, said in a statement.
A major legal battle is brewing between Bank of America President Ken Lewis and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo because the CEO is refusing to hand over a list of Merrill Lynch executives who received $3.6 billion in questionable bonuses right before the banks merged late last year.
"Bank of America has made the decision they don't want to turn that information over to us and we, therefore, tonight served Bank of America with a subpoena to turn over that information," said Special Assistant to the New York Attorney General Benjamin Lawsky Thursday evening, "and we intend to get that by whatever means is necessary going forward."
Lewis met with the attorney general's office for four hours, and he claimed afterward that he fully cooperated.
But New York officials told ABC News the session with Lewis was ugly and combative. They accused Lewis and the bank of stonewalling, saying they refused to provide a list of which executives got what of the billions in bonuses.
We can't allow the CIA to hold the country hostage. We just can't. Too many horrors in the last eight years to let it go, and Panetta better make it clear to his employees. I do feel for the people who were caught in the middle of the White House and their jobs, but it doesn't excuse torture:
WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee is completing plans to begin a review of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program, another sign that lawmakers are determined to have a public accounting of controversial Bush administration programs despite White House concerns about the impact of unearthing the past.
The review, Congressional officials said, will focus in part on whether harsh interrogation procedures authorized by President George W. Bush actually succeeded in extracting important intelligence, as Mr. Bush and his advisers have asserted. The full scope of the inquiry is still being debated on the panel, but it is expected to address broader questions of whether the steps taken by the Central Intelligence Agency to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects were properly authorized.
The Obama administration has been cool to proposals by Democrats to investigate the previous administration, fearing that any protracted inquiry could alienate some within the C.I.A. and have a chilling effect on operations at the spy agency. On Wednesday, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, said he opposed a blanket investigation into the C.I.A. program, saying agency operatives had been carrying out orders and acting with approvals from the Justice Department.
Senior Democrats on Capitol Hill have given little evidence that they will heed White House concerns.
Glenn Greenwald broke this yesterday morning, but it's still news you'll want to hear. Pelosi not only came out for criminal investigations into the Bush administration, she insists Democrats did not know about criminal activities:
In an interview with Rachel Maddow ...House Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeatedly advocated the need for criminal prosecutions, not merely fact-finding. She even directly criticized the proposal by Sen. Pat Leahy for a "Truth Commission," on the ground that such a Commission would improperly immunize lawbreakers and thus foreclose prosecutions:
MADDOW: This is something that liberals have really been pushing. And you have stated your support for John Conyers convening an investigation into potential lawbreaking in the Bush administration.
PELOSI: Absolutely.
MADDOW: You've been outspoken about contempt of Congress charges related to the politicization of the Justice Department and that investigation. You have been less specific about how Congress should proceed on warrantless wiretapping and torture. Why is that? . . .
PELOSI: Senator Leahy has a proposal, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is a good idea. What I have some concern about though is it has immunity. And I think that some of the issues involved here, like the services part, politicizing of the Justice Department, and the rest, they have criminal ramifications, and I don't think we should be giving them immunity.
Pelosi then acknowledged that the FISA bill passed by Congress in 2008 was flawed in many important respects, but said that the "part of the bill that was positive" was the requirement that the Justice Department's Inspector General investigate the NSA eavesdropping program and issue a report (due this Summer) as to the scope and legality of Bush's eavesdropping. About that comment, Maddow asked Pelosi whether she would favor criminal prosecutions if, as many people expect, the IG Report concludes that the warrantless eavesdropping was illegal:
MADDOW: Then in terms of your report, if the inspector general report that comes out this summer suggests that there has been criminal activity at the official level on issues like torture, or wireless wiretapping, or rendition, or any of these other issues...
PELOSI: No one is above the law. I think I have said that.
MADDOW: ... you support a call for a criminal investigation, potential investigation.
PELOSI: Absolutely.
That's pretty definitive.
Maddow then repeatedly, and rather relentlessly, asked Pelosi about how much she was told about the Bush's use of torture and about the warrantless eavesdropping program and whether her having known about those programs was an obstacle to investigations and prosecutions.
Pelosi's answers were largely evasive, but she was very emphatic -- I believe for the first time -- in claiming that while she was told by the CIA about potential "enhanced interrogation techniques" in "the abstract," she was never told that these techniques were actually being used. She also claimed that she put up "very strong resistance" to the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program (I've never seen any evidence of such resistance at all; the only letter from Pelosi that was disclosed was one from October, 2001, which merely raised a concern over whether the NSA had presidential authorization for the program, not whether the program itself was illegal).
But what matters here is that Pelosi insists that nothing she nor any other Democrat knew or did poses an obstacle in any way to full-scale criminal investigations.
Stanford was located early today and served papers in the case in which he's charged with massive investor fraud:
Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Two days after being accused of massive fraud, billionaire R. Allen Stanford surfaced in a Virginia community about 50 miles south of Washington.
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were waiting yesterday at a residence in the Fredericksburg area when Stanford’s car pulled up, according to a person familiar with what transpired. The FBI then served him court papers. He was described as cooperative and cordial.
Stanford, 58, accused by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week of running a “massive, ongoing fraud,” was served with papers related to an SEC civil filing against him and the Stanford Financial Group. Stanford, whose whereabouts were unknown to the SEC earlier in the week, was found with an unidentified woman.
The SEC sued Stanford and two aides on Feb. 17, accusing them of misleading investors about $8 billion in certificates of deposit in Antigua-based Stanford International Bank.
The FBI is investigating the fraud allegation, a person familiar with the case said this week. That investigation is separate from the bureau’s encounter with Stanford yesterday.
Ah yes, the Swiss bank account. Truly, the end of an era. For decades, it was the banking tool of choice for those who were hiding income - for reasons as mundane as tax evasion, but also for more nefarious purposes, like money-laundering from illegal enterprises:
UBS, the largest bank in Switzerland, agreed on Wednesday to divulge the names of well-heeled Americans whom the authorities suspect of using offshore accounts at the bank to evade taxes. The bank admitted conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and agreed to pay $780 million to settle a sweeping federal investigation into its activities.
It is unclear how many of its clients’ names UBS will divulge. Federal prosecutors have been examining about 19,000 accounts at the bank, but UBS ultimately may disclose the identities of only a few hundred customers.
But to some, turning over any names at all heralds the end of the secret Swiss bank account, whose traditions date to the Middle Ages.
“The Swiss are saying that this is the end of Swiss banking as they knew it,” said Jack Blum, an offshore tax specialist. “Nobody will trust the security of the Swiss bank account.”
As part of the settlement, UBS agreed to cooperate with a broad summons issued by the Justice Department to turn over the names. Under the terms of a so-called deferred prosecution agreement, the bank and its executives could be indicted if UBS didn’t identify the customers.
[...] Prosecutors suspect that from late 2002 to 2007, UBS helped American clients illegally hide $20 billion, letting them evade $300 million a year in taxes.
Federal authorities examining the early, chaotic days of the $125 billion American-led effort to rebuild Iraq have significantly broadened their inquiry to include senior American military officers who oversaw the program, according to interviews with senior government officials and court documents.
Court records show that last month investigators subpoenaed the personal bank records of Col. Anthony B. Bell, who is now retired from the Army but who was in charge of reconstruction contracting in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 when the small operation grew into a frenzied attempt to remake the country’s broken infrastructure. In addition, investigators are examining the activities of Lt. Col. Ronald W. Hirtle of the Air Force, who was a senior contracting officer in Baghdad in 2004, according to two federal officials involved in the inquiry.
It is not clear what specific evidence exists against the two men, and both said they had nothing to hide from investigators. Yet officials say that several criminal cases over the past few years point to widespread corruption in the operation the men helped to run. As part of the inquiry, the authorities are taking a fresh look at information given to them by Dale C. Stoffel, an American arms dealer and contractor who was killed in Iraq in late 2004.
Before he was shot on a road north of Baghdad, Mr. Stoffel drew a portrait worthy of a pulp crime novel: tens of thousands of dollars stuffed into pizza boxes and delivered surreptitiously to the American contracting offices in Baghdad, and payoffs made in paper sacks that were scattered in “dead drops” around the Green Zone, the nerve center of the United States government’s presence in Iraq, two senior federal officials said.
Mr. Stoffel, who gave investigators information about the office where Colonel Bell and Colonel Hirtle worked, was deemed credible enough that he was granted limited immunity from prosecution in exchange for his information, according to government documents obtained by The New York Times and interviews with officials and Mr. Stoffel’s lawyer, John H. Quinn Jr. There is no evidence that his death was related to his allegations of corruption.
At a contentious Financial Services Committee hearing today about the failure of the Securities and Exchange Commission to prevent the Bernie Madoff scandal, the SEC's General Counsel cited executive privilege as reason that he and the SEC's enforcement branch were refusing to answer congressional inquiries. You can watch the video here - the executive privilege issue comes at about 5 minutes and 15 seconds into the clip.
As you'll see, SEC officials refuse to answer the committee's basic questions about the Madoff scandal, and the agency's acting general counsel, Andy Vollmer (a Bush holdover and maxed-out donor to John McCain's presidential campaign) explicitly cites executive privilege as his legal rationale for refusing to provide basic information to federal lawmakers.
Congress has a constitutional obligation to engage in basic fact finding, both in order to legislate reforms at the SEC and to publicly expose how our economy was destroyed by sharks like Madoff. Now, Bush holdovers at the SEC are using executive powers - powers that are now President Obama's - to prevent Democratic lawmakers from doing their job.
Washington, D.C., January 15, 2009 - The federal magistrate judge overseeing the White House e-mail litigation today said the issue had reached "true emergency conditions" with only "two business days before the new President takes office" and that "the importance of preserving the e-mails cannot be exaggerated," according to the court's Memorandum Opinion issued this morning along with an Order and posted on the National Security Archive website, www.nsarchive.org .
Magistrate Judge John Facciola formally ordered the White House to search all Executive Office of the President components' workstations and portable media for possibly missing e-mail -- enforcing yesterday's order from U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy -- after government lawyers at a hearing yesterday represented that they would only search those EOP components that create federal agency records and leave out offices that create presidential records.
Today's order also granted plaintiffs' requests that a full inventory of all backup tapes and portable media containing White House e-mail be delivered to the Archivist of the United States and filed with the court, and that the full administrative record and all other evidence related to the White House e-mail be preserved under the custody of the Archivist.
"From the outset, the White House has fought tooth and nail against having to preserve sources of missing e-mail as well as other evidence relating to this case," said Sheila Shadmand of Jones Day, counsel for the Archive. "For the umpteenth time, this Court has commanded that they do so. We expect they will yet again object to the terms of these Orders, when instead they should be busy complying with it. The clock is running out."
Moments ago, Republican Senator David Vitter held his first press conference since his admission that he cheated on his wife by using an escort service in Washington D.C.. Vitter claims he is the victim of his political enemies and just like all good, hypocritical Republicans these days, he's not going to the right thing.
He pays no price for his hanging with hookers by the traditional media and he's acting like a smug jackass to Hillary.
Whenever I see some little diaper wearing toady like David Vitter get all filled with righteous indignation about conflict of interest and setting precedents I just have to laugh. George W. Bush's entire family was a walking conflict of interest for eight years --- his father even accepting money directly from the Saudi Arabian government for his own personal use. It was assumed that Poppy was clean because well .... he was one of them, if you know what I mean.
The village doesn't like Clinton doing this work because it makes their obsessive loathing look petty and shallow, which it is. They insist that there must be something nefarious about it, because they are still convinced that Bill Clinton came to town and trashed the place and they cannot rest until everyone in the world agrees with them. Which it never will.
The former Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee will support Eric Holder's nomination for attorney general, giving him a major boost toward confirmation.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah), who chaired the panel for a decade beginning in 1995, told The Hill that he will support Holder. “I intend to,” said Hatch.
His decision could undermine GOP efforts to stall or block the confirmation. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) said Friday that Holder would be the only Cabinet nominee to face a tough confirmation fight.
Hatch said that Republicans should try to strike a cooperative tone with President-elect Obama during the first days of his administration.“I start with the premise that the president deserves the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think politics should be played with the attorney general,” he said.
“I like Barack Obama and want to help him if I can.”
As obstructionists, I understand that the GOP will do everything they can to attack Obama, but I didn't see the political advantage to start the process by targeting Holder's nomination. I guess Orrin Hatch understands that his party should at least appear to want to work with Obama with them being so loathed in America and all, at least for the time being.
UPDATE: I finished this piece and saw an email that TP had a post up about Arlen Specter's wanking away on the Ashcroft nomination.
Specter’s dismay at Leahy’s prediction is ironic, considering his past statements. On December 24, 2000, two days after then President-elect Bush announced that he had selected John Ashcroft for Attorney General and three weeks before Ashcroft’s confirmation hearings, Specter went on Face the Nation and confidently predicted that Ashcroft would be confirmed by the Senate:
SCHEIFFER: Senator Specter, you’re on the Judiciary Committee. Can John Ashcroft be confirmed?
SPECTER: Yes, I think he can be, and will be. I think the president is entitled to great latitude in the selection of his Cabinet officers. And I know John Ashcroft very well. He’s a first-rate lawyer. He was attorney general of Missouri.
One of the reasons I thought this war (in addition to being immoral) was so very stupid is that I remember the veterans from the Vietnam era - how many of them were a mess when they came home, and how many stayed that way. The power to send soldiers to war is a sacred trust, and it should not be used for anything less than the most compelling reasons.
As bad as it is for soldiers, recruiters have a uniquely stressful job in which they're expected to somehow turn their own war experiences into happy talk for potential converts:
Morning Edition, January 2, 2009 · The Army is investigating a cluster of suicides in the Houston Recruiting Battalion, where five soldiers have taken their own lives since 2001. Nationally, 17 recruiters have committed suicide during the same period.
Back in March of 2007, Aron Andersson locked himself in the cab of his Ford 150 pickup, called home to say he was going to kill himself, shot up the dashboard radio, and then put a bullet in his head. He had threatened suicide five months earlier, and back then his father, Bob Andersson, reported him to the military.
"I don't know if that was the right thing to do, but I called a major and told him his girlfriend had said he threatened to commit suicide, and she told me he was going through night terrors and a bunch of other things. And he'd get up to go to work in the morning and tell his girlfriend he was exhausted, and she'd say, 'Yeah you've been jumpin' over the couch, hidin' behind the chairs and stuff, like you're in battle,' and he wouldn't even realize it in the morning," Andersson says.
Aron Andersson served two tours in Iraq, and he was furious with his father for reporting him, saying his Army career would be ended.
"And I just simply told him, 'Well, Aron, if you don't talk to me ever again, I can live with that. But if I didn't turn you in and something happened, I don't think I could live with that,' " Bob Andersson says.
Andersson says his son had trouble delivering the required two recruits a month, especially after his experience in Iraq.
"How could you be over there and see some of the things he saw and dealt with, and try to hire people to go over there and do that?" he says.
Note from Nicole: With this post, we're very happy to introduce C&Lers to Dave Neiwert, who has graciously agreed to join us as Managing Editor. David was formerly with MSNBC, and is a published author, a National Press Club award-winning journalist as well as the owner of the fantastic blog, Orcinus. We're thrilled to have him here. Please join me in welcoming David.
Max Blumenthal and I recently spent several days on separate visits to Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin's hometown where she was mayor from 1996 to 2002. We talked to a number of local residents and pored over a number of city documents, looking into Palin's associations with a far-right political faction in Wasilla. (We working thanks to a grant from The Nation Institute's Investigative Fund.)
The report is now complete and can be read in its entirety at Salon.com. You can also see above the video Max made of his interview with one of the faction's main leaders, a man named Mark Chryson, who headed up the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party during the same time period. It pretty much speaks for itself.
Essentially here’s what we found:
That Gov. Palin, when a Wasilla city council member, formed an alliance with some of the more radical far-right citizens in Wasilla and vicinity, particularly members of the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party who were allied with local John Birch Society activists. These activists played an important role in her election as Wasilla mayor in 1996.
Once mayor, one of Mrs. Palin’s first acts was to attempt to appoint one of these extremists (a man named Steve Stoll) to her own seat on the city council. This was a man with a history of disrupting city council meetings with intimidating behavior. She was blocked by a single city council member.
Afterward, Mrs. Palin fired the city’s museum director at the behest of this faction.
She fomented an ultimately successful effort to derail a piece of local gun-control legislation which would simply have prohibited the open carry of firearms into schools, liquor stores, libraries, courthouses and the like. The people recruited to shout this ordinance down included these same figures, notably the local AIP representative (who became the AIP’s chairman that same year).
She remained associated politically with the local AIP/Birch faction throughout her tenure as mayor on other issues, particularly a successful effort to amend the Alaska Constitution to prohibit local governments from issuing any local gun-control ordinances.
In general, we found that not only did Mrs. Palin have numerous associations with these extremists, she actively sought to empower them locally and to enact their agendas both locally and on a state level.
We sent an e-mail to the McCain/Palin campaign asking for their reaction to these findings, and have so far received no response. If and when we do, we'll update.
We haven't any insight into Palin's accusations that Barack Obama "palled around with terrorists" by associating with William Ayers. But we do know there are serious questions about her own dalliances with the far right during the same time period. We didn't find any evidence that Palin herself subscribed to their "New World Order" conspiracy theories, but it's clear she was comfortable with not only aligning herself with them politically, but putting them in positions of actual political power and influence.
I'll be back tomorrow with some City of Wasilla documents you can peruse on your own substantiating our findings.
UPDATE: (Nicole) Max Blumenthal appeared on Rachel Maddow to discuss this article
Thomas Frank is the Wall Street Journal's resident liberal, still, this has gotta hurt:
Last week, Republican presidential candidate John McCain called for a commission to "find out what went wrong" on Wall Street. It was an excellent suggestion: Public inquiries into Wall Street practices served the country well in the 1930s.
And Mr. McCain has a special advantage to bring to any such investigation -- many of the relevant witnesses are friends or colleagues of his. In fact, he can probably get to the bottom of the whole mess just by cross-examining the people riding on his campaign bus. So the candidate should take a deep breath, remind himself that the country comes first, pull the Straight Talk Express over at a rest stop, whistle up his media pals, and begin.
Read on. Phil Gramm's wife's connection to Enron? Cindy was having tea with the Keating Five in comparison.
