Posted on 05/28/2006 6:35:29 AM PDT by MNJohnnie
WASHINGTON — The constitutional showdown that followed the FBI's search of a congressman's office came down to this: The House threatened budgetary retaliation against the Justice Department. Justice officials raised the prospect of resigning.
That scenario, as described Saturday by a senior administration official, set the stage for President Bush's intervention into the fight over the FBI's search of the office of Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., an eight-term lawmaker being investigated on bribery allegations.
During contentious conversations between the Department of Justice and the House, top law enforcement officials indicated that they'd rather quit than return documents FBI agents, armed with a warrant, seized in an overnight search of Jefferson's office, the administration official said.
Until last Saturday night, no such warrant had ever been used to search a lawmaker's office in the 219-year history of the Congress. FBI agents carted away records in their pursuit of evidence that Jefferson accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for helping set up business deals in Africa.
After the raid, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill, lodged a protest directly with Bush, demanding that the FBI return the materials. Bush struck a compromise Thursday, ordering that the documents be sealed for 45 days until congressional leaders and the Justice Department agree on what to do with them.
(Story continues below)
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Sometimes I think we lost it a long time ago; it has taken the Internet to show us just HOW corrupt people become after going to Washington DC to "serve" their constituents.
"Serve," my *ss. Once there, they become corrupt and forget the "serve" part.
Mark Steyn mocked the GOP and Hastert specifically for getting in the way of Rep. Jefferson's scandal.
spin that thing!!
Thank you for the attempt to insert a small note of sanity in a Free Republic thread.
Unlikely to bear much fruit,however.
Best regards,
This fear of being spied on is laughable. if you had any idea of the volumes of data that are available it would become pretty obvious that for someone to single an individual out unless there were some serious red flags is laughable.
Let me give you a hint - no one cares what the hell you are doing.
Sure ... guidelines like a thirty day notice so that incriminating evidence can be shredded. Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, needs to be fired.
Exactly. I don't think I could get Denny Hastert this excited if I starved him for a week & then waved a smoked turkey in front of his nose. < /disgust with all of 'em >
Your larger point? If I am reading the SCOTUS correctly (post 57) Hasert has no leg to stand on.
Like I said in another post. I cannot understand all these so called Republicans coming out and supporting this guy William Jefferson. Do these same 'pubies think that a guy like William Jefferson would come out in support of one of them if there refrigirators or freezers were raided by the FBI and $90,000 was found wrapped up like a Lasagna?
Methinks it has something to do with Hastert accepting $100k in donations from Jack Abramoff's Indian tribal clients, and subsequently writing Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton, urging her to reject a request for a new casino from the Jena tribe of Choctaw Indians, ostensibly because he was against the proliferation of Indian casinos. Nothing anywhere near as blatantly illegal as what Rep. Jefferson is alleged to have done, but it raises uncomfortable questions as to the extent to which influence peddling exists in Congress.
I agree there is a balance of power issue - that of the legislative branch making themselves immune to the other branches.
(left unsaid)...so that they can have enough lead time to destroy or remove any incriminating materials and documents from their files and desks, no doubt. In short, they're ALL crooks, Republican and Democrat alike!
There was an article yesterday about the leaking of NSA monitoring overseas calls. Before the event of the NSA monitoring overseas calls, 15 people were briefed about it. These 15 people were the leaders of both parties. Can we now WONDER which one of the 15 leaked the information to msm? Can we now wonder why our elected servants are tightening their skirts arount their ankles? We might find through investigation that our exalted servants are not the "law abiding" citizens we thought.
I haven't been keeping up with this closely so maybe there's something I don't know or haven't heard. (?) I just find it hard to believe that any politician would go to these lengths unless he had something to hide or had a $take in the outcome somehow.
"However, there is absolutely no guarantee that innocent Americans haven't been spied on."
Spied on? You mean a database that gathers a list of what phone numbers call other phone numbers? That is just a gathering of data, not spying.
What type of "spying" are you suggesting is taking place on innocent Americans without civil protections?
I think so also. It's not clear to me that Speaker of the House Hastert is incorrect in asserting that there are Constitutional issues. I think President Bush has acted wisely to put a hold on this for 45 days while this can be clarified.
From the Speaker's webpage:
There's a right way
May 26, 2006
If the information we have read about the behavior of Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., seems as obvious to a jury as it does to me, he deserves to be vigorously prosecuted. I do not want to do anything that will interfere with that prosecution.
The issue that has concerned me, as Speaker, since Saturday night is not if the FBI should be able to search a member of Congress' office, but rather how to do it within the boundaries of the Constitution.
On Thursday, President Bush recognized that serious constitutional issues needed to be resolved. He wisely directed the Department of Justice to send the documents (taken from Jefferson's office last weekend) to the Solicitor General's office for safekeeping for 45 days. This was a meaningful step. The president also encouraged the Justice Department to meet with us.
Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and I directed the lawyers for the House to develop reasonable protocols and procedures that will make it possible for the FBI to go into congressional offices to constitutionally-execute a search warrant.
In more than 219 years, the Justice Department has never found it necessary to use a search warrant to obtain documents from a congressional office. These issues have always been resolved without the necessity of a search warrant, and prosecutions have gone forward.
Justice Department officials now insist that this specific case required them, for the first time, to conduct a search. I regret that when they reached this conclusion, they did not work with us to figure out a way to do it consistently with the Constitution. But that is behind us now. I am confident that in the next 45 days, the lawyers will figure out how to do it right.
Nice to see the separation of powers is still working.
Okay. NOW we're getting somewhere...
I specifically mentioned the warrantless wiretapping program, not the phone number gathering program. And that I supported all of the NSA programs.
But read into my post what you will; you're missing the broader point and how above the law, even with a warrant, this all appears to the average American.
So we had the bogus shooting incident at the Rayburn building - total lockdown and all the reporters etc kept in the cafeteria.
Time to clean out the offices without prying eyes.
Scenario one: Bogus Rayburn incident set up by dirty congressmen to clean out their offices - major shredding party that evening.
Scenario two: Bogus Rayburn incident set up by someone else to go in and grab additional materials from offices for investigation - watergate style.
In either case the implications of the news is quite bad.
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