Culture Of Corruption: Democrat Edition

So many stories, so little time.

Another Obama nominee withdraws from the Treasury:

Democratic sources say that H. Rodgin Cohen, a partner in the New York law firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, and the leading candidate for Deputy Treasury Secretary, has withdrawn from consideration.

It's the third withdrawal of a top Treasury Department staff pick in less than a week.
I reported last week that Cohen was likely to be officially nominated for the Deputy Treasury Secretary position.

Cohen has been a counsel to just about every major player on Wall Street, which perhaps complicated his nomination.

Now, the nomination is off.

Makes you wonder if he paid his taxes, doesn't it? Regardless, is anyone else getting worried that we're facing 'the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression' but Obama can't find people to staff his Treasury department? Okay, this may not be corruption, but it certainly is incompetence. Now, on to the real corruption!

Dirty money

Back in December, when the story broke that Bernard Madoff had fleeced investors of billions of dollars in a Ponzi scheme, the Huffington Post's Sam Stein asked the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee if it would return more than $100,000 the group had received from Madoff. A DSCC spokesman said at the time that that decision "is under review."

Today, Madoff pleaded guilty and now faces a sentence of up to 150 years in jail. Asked this evening if the DSCC would return the Madoff money, spokesman Eric Schultz told me: "We haven't returned the money, and there are no immediate plans to do so."

Dem Congressmen bought off

The West Virginia High Tech Consortium has provided more than $75,000 in free rent and administrative services to the Robert H. Mollohan Family Charitable Foundation, according to tax records, while receiving millions of dollars worth of earmarks from Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W. Va.), who serves as the family foundation’s secretary.
----------
Over the course of the past decade, Rep. John P. Murtha has earmarked millions of dollars for the Electro-Optics Center at Penn State University — money that has, in turn, gone to clients of the PMA Group, the Murtha-linked lobbying shop that was raided in November as part of a federal criminal probe.

Founded in 1999 as a joint enterprise run by Penn State and the Office of Naval Research, the EOC promotes electronic research needed for state-of-the-art military equipment.

But sources familiar with the EOC’s operations say Murtha has used the center as a “front” for PMA and other lobbyists and contractors with ties to the Pennsylvania Democrat.
----------
Top banking regulators were taken aback late last year when a California congresswoman helped set up a meeting in which the chief executive of a bank with financial ties to her family asked them for up to $50 million in special bailout funds, Treasury officials said.

Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, requested the September meeting on behalf of executives at OneUnited, one of the nation’s largest black-owned banks. Ms. Water’s husband, Sidney Williams, had served on the bank’s board of directors until early last year and has owned at least $250,000 in stock in the institution.

Unethical head of Senate banking committee

The Senate Ethics Committee has been looking into possible conflicts of interest in Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd's 2003 mortgages. Now questions about another Dodd real-estate adventure, this one in Ireland, should keep the Ethicists even busier. All the more because Mr. Dodd's "cottage" purchase involves a crooked stock trader for whom the Senator once did a very big political favor.

Obama's CTO office raided...so was her home

The FBI is serving a search warrant at the office of D.C.’s Chief Technology Officer [Vivek Kundra], WTOP has learned.

“We are there as part of a continuing ongoing criminal investigation,” FBI Washington Field Office spokesperson Katherine Schweit tells WTOP.

Schweit would not comment on the details of the investigation.

Don't expect any change on this culture of corruption anytime soon. It's just too much to hope for.

There's my two cents.