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Chamber of Commerce to Politicians: Quiet on Donors

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

readersupportednews.org - By Ryan J. Reilly - Jul. 31 (News Report) - The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has written a letter to members of the House telling them that voting for federal contractors to be more transparent about their political spending will negatively impact their legislative scorecard.

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Today's Must Read

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel - Apr. 15 (Opinion) - Back in February, the AP broke the story that the White House had secretly modified a proposed rule to crack down on contract fraud.

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Voting Chief Tanner Resigns

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0800

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel - Dec. 14 (Opinion) - Today, John Tanner resigned from his position effective immediately as chief of the Civil Rights Division's voting section. His resignation email, with the subject line "Moving On" was sent out at approximately 11 AM to voting section staff.

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Rudy Put $400,000 In Advance Funds On Credit Card For Travel Expenses

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 03:25:00 -0800

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel, Greg Sargent - Dec. 01 (News Report) - We've been swimming in credit card receipts from Rudy Giuliani's administration today, and one thing in particular has struck us: in 2001, apparently with an eye to future globetrotting, Giuliani's administration sent a check for $400,000 to American Express.

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Ex-Navy Instructor Promises to Hit Back If Attacked on Torture

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 08:43:32 -0800

TPM Muckraker - By Spencer Ackerman - Nov. 08 (News Report) - Our body of experience shows a friendly approach is most successful in interrogation, Nance says. SERE's historical memory goes back to the French and Indian Wars in understanding torture methods that captured U.S. troops might face and devising strategies to resist them. He relates the story of Hans Joachim Scharff, a master Luftwaffe interrogator who spurned abusive techniques used by the Gestapo (also, interestingly, termed "enhanced interrogation") in favor of rapport-building. Scharff's legendary success is still studied by U.S. interrogators. Unfortunately, he says, "after Guantanamo, I thought, how can anyone at SERE ever teach the Geneva Conventions again?"

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D'Oh: House Panel Screw-Up Reveals Whistleblower Email Addresses

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 06:20:00 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel - Oct. 27 (News Report) - But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the email addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who had written in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters who had used the website form, including presumably whistleblowers themselves, and all of the recipients of the email were accidentally included in the "to:" field -- instead of concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy or "bcc:".

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Kennedy Asks Mukasey for Review of Voting Rights Chief

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 08:29:43 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel - Oct. 26 (News Report) - Last week Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) called for the Justice Department's voting rights chief John Tanner to be fired. And in written questions to attorney general nominee Michael Mukasey this week, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) asked Mukasey to review Tanner's record and consider whether he ought to be canned.

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Obama: Fire Voting Rights Chief

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 12:11:17 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel - Oct. 19 (News Report) - In a letter today, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) urged the acting attorney general to fire voting rights section chief John Tanner. Citing Tanner's remarks earlier this month that "minorities don't become elderly the way white people do: They die first," Obama wrote that "Through his inexcusable comments, Mr. Tanner has clearly demonstrated that he possesses neither the character nor the judgment to be heading the Voting Rights Section." He concluded: "For that reason, I respectfully request that you remove him from his position."

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Conyers Has More Questions For DOJ's Tanner

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:42:14 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By David Kurtz - Oct. 12 (News Report) - House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers has issued a statement in in response to Paul Kiel's reporting earlier today on the unprecedented written public assurance that DOJ voting rights chief John Tanner gave to election officials in Ohio that the Justice Department had found no evidence of intentional African-American voter disenfranchisement in the 2004 election.

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Phone Jamming Cover-up at DoJ? Conyers Wants Answers

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 09:15:56 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel - Oct. 05 (Opinion) - It happened nearly five years ago, but House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) still has plenty of questions about the New Hampshire phone jamming case. In a letter Wednesday, he asked Acting Attorney General Peter Keisler a number of questions about the case, focusing in particular on whether the Justice Department has "adequately investigated and prosecuted" the case. You can read the letter here.

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U.S. Attorneys Investigation Waits on House Leadership

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 14:16:38 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel - Oct. 03 (Opinion) - "The scandal at the Department of Justice has gone on long enough," said Rep. Rahm Emmanuel (D-IL) back in March. Careers have been destroyed and legitimate public corruption cases have been derailed. It is time for accountability -- it is time for the truth." Six months and several Department senior resignations later, it's a different time. The urgency is gone.

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U.S. Attorneys Investigation Waits on House Leadership

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 11:30:00 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel - Oct. 03 (News Report) - "The scandal at the Department of Justice has gone on long enough," said Rep. Rahm Emmanuel (D-IL) back in March. "Careers have been destroyed and legitimate public corruption cases have been derailed. It is time for accountability -- it is time for the truth."

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Voter Fraud Guru up for Vote Tomorrow

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 17:46:11 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel - Sep. 25 (News Analysis) - Finally, the time has come. The Senate Rules Committee will vote tomorrow on whether Hans von Spakovsky, the former Justice Department official who former employees say was key to the politicization of voting rights section, will get a term on the Federal Elections Commission. Von Spakovsky is also a veteran of Republican efforts to target voter fraud.

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Gonzales Testimony Part of Broader Effort to Conceal Surveillance Program

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 11:30:00 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Spencer Ackerman, Paul Kiel - Jul. 26 (News Analysis) - There's a lot of evidence to suggest that Gonzales's careful, repeated phrasing to the Senate that he will only discuss the program that "the president described" was deliberate, part of a concerted administration-wide strategy to conceal from the public the very broad scope of that initial program. When, for the first time, Program X (as we'll call it, for convenience's sake) became known to senior Justice Department officials who were not its original architects, those officials -- James Comey and Jack Goldsmith, principally -- balked at its continuation. They did not back down until the program had undergone as-yet-unspecified but apparently significant revisions. But when President Bush announced what he would call the "Terrorist Surveillance Program' in December 2005, he left the clear impression that the program had always functioned the same way since its 2001 inception.

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House Committee Approves Contempt Citation

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 11:00:07 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel - Jul. 25 (News Report) - As expected the House Judiciary Committee approved citations of contempt against Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten in a vote just a few minutes ago. The vote was along party lines, 22-17. We'll have more from the committee's meeting shortly.

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Don Young Under Federal Criminal Investigation

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 14:21:48 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Laura McGann - Jul. 25 (News Report) - The Wall Street Journal reports that 18-term Rep. Don Young (R-AK) is under criminal investigation for his dealings with Alaska oil services company Veco Corp. While the investigation into Sen. Ted Stevens' (R-AK) ties to Veco, including the remodeling of his Girdwood home, has been widely reported, this is the first time Young has been implicated in the scandal. It looks like an annual pig-roast fundraiser snared the congressman known for huge pork projects, including the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere."

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Former Rove Aide Testifies before the Senate

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:23:40 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel - Jul. 11 (News Report) - Sara Taylor, until recently Karl Rove's former aide at the White House, will begin her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in a matter of minutes. You can see Taylor's opening statement here. In it, she says that she intends "to follow the President's instruction" and not testify about conversations she had at the White House about the U.S. attorney firings. However, there may still be certain questions she can answer:

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Bush Commutes Libby Sentence

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 16:50:00 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel - Jul. 02 (News Report) - Breaking, from the AP: "President Bush commutes the prison sentence for former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby." -- Update: The president has reduced Libby's original sentence of thirty months of prison, two years of probation ...

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Voter Suppression Showdown, Round 2: Von Spakovsky

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:55:04 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel - Jun. 13 (News Report) - Following Bradley Schlozman's memorable performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, former senior Civil Rights Division higher-up Hans von Spakovsky will be appearing before the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration tomorrow.

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Some in U.S. Intelligence See Musharraf on His Way Out

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 00:15:13 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Spencer Ackerman - Jun. 12 (News Report) - ince September 11, 2001, the U.S.'s Pakistan policy can be summed up in two words: Pervez Musharraf. But within the U.S. intelligence community, and in Pakistan, there's a growing belief that the U.S.-friendly military dictator's days are drawing to a close -- and possibly within the next few months. It may be time for the U.S. to face what it's long feared in the nuclear state: the prospect of chaos, rising Islamism or anti-Americanism that follows Musharraf. But the hope -- among Pakistani military officers and politicians, to say nothing of U.S. diplomats -- is that the increasingly inept and unpopular Musharraf can be eased out of power while the U.S. slowly distances itself from him, allowing for as smooth a transition as is possible in the turbulent South Asian country. Some see the Pakistani Army remaining powerful enough to prevent a chaotic transition or an Islamist takeover. "This is going to be a Pinochet-like transition, instead of a Marcos-like one," one former Pakistani official tells TPMmuckraker. In other words, according to the ex-official, the U.S. may not stand foursquare behind its ally Musharraf until he's ultimately forced from power, as President Ronald Reagan chose with doomed Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

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Goodling Admits to Breaking Law with Political Hiring

Wed, 23 May 2007 12:05:00 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel - May. 23 (News Report) - Both in her opening statement and in further testimony, Goodling admitted to weeding out candidates for assistant U.S. attorney positions because they were not Republicans. Under questioning from Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA), Goodling admitted that she did block the hiring of an assistant U.S. attorney in the D.C. U.S. attorney's office because she judged him too liberal. "I made a snap judgment and I regret it," she said. When Sanchez pressed as to how many times Goodling had done this, Goodling said she couldn't come up with a number, and that she didn't "feel like there were that many cases."

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Gonzales: Criticism Damages DoJ Employees

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 16:58:53 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel - Apr. 19 (News Report) - Under questioning from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Gonzales cautioned against criticizing the good employees of the Justice Department: "when there are attacks against the department, you're attacking the career professionals." Sen. Durbin blew up, comparing it to those who say that criticizing the president is equivalent to criticizing the troops. Gonzales finally backed off, and both Durbin and Gonzales agreed that Gonzales was the one on the line. "Attack me," Gonzales said. I don't think he needs to ask twice.

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Meet Monica "Buzz Saw" Goodling

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 09:34:30 -0700

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel - Apr. 01 (Opinion) - There has been an assumption that Monica Goodling, the Justice Department's liaison to the White House, is pleading the Fifth simply because of her role in preparing false testimony to Congress.

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Webb Introduces Bill Restricting War with Iran

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 09:33:50 -0800

TPM Muckraker - By Paul Kiel - Mar. 06 (News Report) - Ever since Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) asked Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in a Senate committee hearing whether it was the view of the administration that it had the authority to invade Iran without provocation or congressional authorization, we've been watching to see if he got an answer.

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As Whistle Blows for 110th Congress, Dem Probers Still Suiting Up

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 07:54:37 -0800

TPM Muckraker - By Justin Rood - Jan. 03 (News Report) - The House returns tomorrow to begin a new session. Democrats have announced they'll push an ambitious legislative agenda in the first 100 hours, but some people -- us, of course, and many of our readers -- are eager to see congressional investigations kick off a new era of more involved oversight. Well, I hear we're all going to have to wait a while for those fireworks to begin. Just like the Fourth of July, the parade comes first.

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