WaPo Fires Warning Shot At Pelosi Over Hastings

The WaPo issued a warning to would be House Speaker Pelosi today by recounting events in the 1989 trial of Alcee Hastings. That as a Democrat leadership in hiding with their Liberal bent must still be fuming at Kerry's forgetting to wear his lucky Cambodian hat for a recent California speech that could put the coming election's outcome in doubt.

Ruth Marcus also lays out the divides within the party, suggesting the Black Caucus isn't going to roll over and allow Alcee Hastings, already playing the oppressed victim in a quote, to be passed over for the Chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee - a phrase  that could become an oxymoron if the Dems do manage to take control of the lower chamber.

While Pelosi wasn't one of the seven individuals shot dead during San Francisco's city sanctioned Halloween Party last night, it seems it's already open season on the powers that might be in DC after next week's election. Marcus covered the Hastings trial and all but concludes Hastings was guilty and is unfit for the committee's top spot.

It's impossible not to like Hastings. But as someone who covered his impeachment and Senate trial, I can't get past the facts of the case, which convince me that Hastings did indeed agree to conspire with a close friend, a prominent Washington lawyer named William A. Borders Jr., to solicit the bribe. Borders was convicted of the bribery scheme in a separate trial, and he served additional time for contempt rather than testify in the congressional proceedings.

Consider: Hastings, a federal judge, gets word from Borders's lawyer that Borders has been arrested for conspiring to bribe him and that the FBI wants to interview him. Instead of calling the FBI agents whose names and numbers he's been given, Hastings leaves his hotel without checking out and heads to the airport outside Baltimore instead of National, where there's an earlier flight. At BWI, Hastings calls his girlfriend, has her call him back at a different pay phone, then asks her to leave the house to call him from a pay phone, then calls her back from a different pay phone. He doesn't speak to the FBI until they track him down at the girlfriend's house later that night.

Speaker-in-waiting Pelosi: This is not the behavior of an innocent man -- or of an intelligence committee chairman.

Comments

[rhodeymark]

Dan, slow down pal. I know that a lot of crap has been going on and you're doing a yeoman's job of updating, but 7 shot, none dead (yet) in Frisco according to that article.