“Just The Tip Of The Iceberg”: The Real Scandal With Tough-Guy Rep Michael Grimm
Rep. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.), a two-term Staten Island congressman with stints in the Marines and FBI, grabbed our attention after President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night. More specifically, he grabbed NY1 reporter Michael Scotto after Scotto asked him about a bubbling campaign finance scandal, memorably uttering these words, caught on the rolling camera’s video (watch http://youtu.be/425ysh-24wo):
Let me be clear to you, you ever do that to me again I’ll throw you off this f—ing balcony…. You’re not man enough, you’re not man enough. I’ll break you in half. Like a boy. [NY1]
Alright, that’s probably a sentiment a lot of politicians have wanted to convey to a reporter. But now, thanks to Grimm’s threats, everybody knows that he is embroiled in, and touchy about, something to do with allegedly illegal campaign donations. Before we get to that story, Grimm decided to address his partial-on-camera outburst with this statement:
I was extremely annoyed because I was doing NY1 a favor by rushing to do their interview first in lieu of several other requests. The reporter knew that I was in a hurry and was only there to comment on the State of the Union, but insisted on taking a disrespectful and cheap shot at the end of the interview because I did not have time to speak off-topic. I verbally took the reporter to task and told him off because I expect a certain level of professionalism and respect, especially when I go out of my way to do that reporter a favor. I doubt that I am the first member of Congress to tell off a reporter, and I am sure I won’t be the last.
MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin sarcastically cuts to the PR lesson:
Well this careful apology should ensure this Michael Grimm story goes away fast pic.twitter.com/vMymkxViuZ
But here’s the story Scotto was asking Grimm about in the Capitol rotunda: Last week, the FBI arrested Grimm’s fundraiser (and ex-girlfriend) Diana Durand on charges of illegally contributing more than $10,000 to Grimm’s 2010 campaign through straw donors. Here’s how the New York Daily News describes the alleged “donor swapping”:
The swapping works like this: A donor who gives the maximum to Candidate A then donates to Candidate B — and in return, a donor or friend of Candidate B gives an identical amount to Candidate A. [NY Daily News]
In one case described by the Daily News, Candidate A was Bert Mizusawa, a GOP House candidate in Virginia, and the maxed-out donor was Washington lawyer Bazil Facchina; Durand was the second alleged donor, and Grimm Candidate B. The newspaper said its review of 2010 federal campaign finance record found at least another 20 such transactions involving Grimm and fellow candidates in California, South Dakota, Illinois, and Virginia.
The Daily News investigation implicates Grimm personally in one questionable transaction, but he’s not listed in the Justice Department indictment. But Grimm has been under investigation for two years, and Durand is merely the newest wrinkle. In August, Ofer Biton — a former top aide to Israeli Orthodox Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto — pleaded guilty to visa fraud; in early 2012, The New York Times reported that Biton and Grimm allegedly sought illegal campaign donations from Pinto followers, including large cash contributions and donations from undocumented immigrants.
Even with those allegations, Grimm’s constituents re-elected him in 2012, 48 percent to 43 percent. He first won election in the GOP wave of 2010, unseating freshman Democrat Michael McMahon by about three points. But let’s face it, campaign finance violations fall into the category of “boring but important,” with an emphasis on boring. Threatening to murder a reporter with your bare hands? Not boring.
And that’s not even the most colorful story in Grimm’s recent past. (No, I’m not talking about this one.) In 2006, after leaving the FBI, he opened up a health food restaurant with an alleged mobster with ties to the Gambino crime family. And in 2011, Evan Ratliff wrote about FBI undercover operations in The New Yorker, including some eyebrow-raising allegations about Grimm from a New York City Police officer who was moonlighting as a bouncer. At the time, July 1999, Grimm was an FBI agent, apparently dating a married woman.
According to the NYPD officer, Gordon Williams, Grimm and the woman entered a nightclub in Queens, Caribbean Tropics, around midnight and ran into the woman’s estranged husband. Williams broke up the ensuing altercation, but says Grimm and the husband returned at 2:30 a.m. for a standoff in the club’s garage, with Grimm waving a gun around, screaming he was going to kill the guy, and saying: “I’m a fucking FBI agent, ain’t nobody going to threaten me.” Ratliff then recounts this epilogue:
Grimm left the club, but at 4 a.m., just before the club closed, he returned again, according to Williams, this time with another FBI agent and a group of NYPD officers. Grimm had told the police that he had been assaulted by the estranged husband and his friends. Williams said that Grimm took command of the scene, and refused to let the remaining patrons and employees leave. “Everybody get up against the fucking wall,” Williams recalled him saying. “The FBI is in control.” Then Grimm, who apparently wanted to find the man with whom he’d had the original altercation, said something that Williams said he’ll never forget: “All the white people get out of here.” [New Yorker]
Completely accurate or not (Grimm says not), that’s a pretty juicy story. And not many people would know about it if Grimm had kept his temper in check Tuesday night.
By: Peter Weber, The Week, January 29, 2014
“Sinister Policy Implications”: The GOP’s Glaring State Of The Union Hypocrisies
The 19th-Century British politician Benjamin Disraeli once said, “A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.” This was obviously a prescient review of the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union Address.
Mind you, it’s hard to know which Republican response to respond to, given that there were (at least) four. But let’s start with the official one, delivered by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wa), the highest-ranking woman in the House Republican caucus. With a lulling tone and a living room-like backdrop, McMorris Rodgers’s response was less like a speech and more like a bedtime story trying to use her sweet biography to mask more sinister policy implications.
McMorris Rodgers spoke of her son, who has Down’s Syndrome. The doctors, McMorris Rodgers said, “told us all the problems. But when we looked at our son, we saw only possibilities.” That was the moral of her story, that we all have boundless and equal opportunity in life and the only thing getting in our way is government—because of Democrats. What a nice story. It just happens to be utterly untrue.
Take just one example—when McMorris Rodgers insisted, “Republicans believe health care choices should be yours, not the government’s.” Planned Parenthood quickly pointed out that just five hours before McMorris Rodgers spoke those words, House Republicans passed a set of sweeping bills that would significantly reduce the number of private health insurance plans that cover abortion. That, in other words, is Republicans using government to interfere in the private marketplace and control the decisions that women about their own bodies.
Disraeli might be disappointed—a well organized hypocrisy would probably wait at least 24 hours before uttering such a flagrant contradiction. But wait, there’s more.
McMorris Rodgers added, “whether you’re a boy with Down syndrome or a woman with breast cancer … you can find coverage and a doctor who will treat you.” What a great idea! Hey, there should be a health care reform law that prohibits private insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions—which, of course, is only possible if we expand the pool of people in private insurance pools. Republicans should, I dunno, get behind a law that supports that, doncha think? Instead of voting again and again and again to repeal it?
McMorris Rodgers started her speech by noting that she worked at a McDonald’s drive-thru to help pay for college and then, after talking about her son, said, “whether we are born with an extra twenty-first chromosome or without a dollar to our name—we are not defined by our limits, but by our potential.” Yes, but the problem is that Republican policies are expressly limiting that potential. When we allow highly profitable corporations like McDonald’s to pay their workers poverty wages at the same time we give those big businesses giant tax breaks and government handouts, we are limiting the potential for hard work to pay off in America. When instead of passing comprehensive immigration reform, we allow unscrupulous employers to exploit undocumented workers—driving down wages and working conditions for immigrants and citizens alike—we undermine equal opportunity. When we fail to acknowledge the simple reality that women and people of color and rural white folks in America face profound wage and wealth disparities not because they don’t try hard but because of policies that have stacked the deck against them, policies Republicans have continued to embrace, we naively pretend that the playing field of opportunity in America is a level one. It is not.
Talking about your son with Down’s Syndrome as a metaphor for the values of a Republican Party that cut federal funding for Down’s Syndrome research over the past several years is hypocrisy. Being a major political party that represents millions of Americans and yet fails to grasp the very real barriers to opportunity those Americans face, barriers made worse by your own policies, is beyond hypocritical. It’s sad.
By: Sally Kohn, The Daily Beast, January 29, 2014
“Obama’s Best State Of The Union Speech”: Pretty Sure The Last Three Years Of His Presidency Won’t Be Boring
With a strong, optimistic beginning and an unforgettable ending, that may have been President Obama’s best State of the Union speech. Apparently none of the commentators who have been saying his presidency is on its last legs bothered to let him know.
He opened with a portrait of the country – not an America gripped by crisis or mired in despondency, but a sunny place where unemployment is falling, school test scores are rising, housing prices are recovering, deficits are shrinking and manufacturing jobs are coming home. “I believe this can be a breakthrough year for America,” Obama said. The big problem, he said, was the performance of the people sitting before him in the House chamber: “We are not doing right by the American people.” He went on to excoriate Congress for its insistence on trench warfare, challenged his opponents to “focus on creating new jobs, not creating new crises” and pledged that if Republicans won’t work with him, he will take executive action where possible.
But the president’s tone throughout the speech was buoyant, not sour. His defense of the Affordable Care Act was an observation that House Republicans’ first 40 useless votes to repeal the law really should suffice. Even when he bludgeoned the GOP over long-term unemployment benefits or the minimum wage, he did it with a smile. His argument for equal pay and family leave? “It’s time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a ‘Mad Men’ episode.” His call for raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10? “Join the rest of the country. Say yes. Give America a raise.”
There was much that Obama did not say. I heard only one vague, substance-free sentence about domestic surveillance. There was no real discussion of foreign policy until the speech neared the one-hour mark, and the really tough problems where U.S. ideals and interests are out of alignment – Egypt, for example – were not grappled with. The specific executive actions he has vowed to take are significant but not earth-shaking – with one exception: Obama promised to use his authority to regulate carbon emissions. If he is as serious about tackling climate change as he said tonight, this may turn out to be one of the most important speeches of his presidency.
The end of the speech, a tribute to wounded Sgt. 1st Class Cory Remsburg, was an indelible moment. To end with such a powerful story of bravery and resilience gave emotional depth to the overall theme of the speech: America is back. I don’t know how much of his agenda Obama will achieve. But I’m pretty sure the last three years of his presidency won’t be boring.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 29, 2014
“GOP Post Campaign Buckraking”: When Politicians Embrace The Power Of Spam
As a notable Republican presidential candidate, Herman Cain was able to pull together an email list of several hundred thousand people. His campaign obviously didn’t turn out well, but Cain eventually created an online media venture called Best of Cain, which continues to send out messages to former supporters on a wide range of topics.
How wide a range? Those on Cain’s mailing list recently received an alert with an all-caps subject line about a “breakthrough remedy” for erectile dysfunction. It was, of course, an ad – and a rather clumsy one at that. Cain supporters were told they were at risk of losing their loved one unless they got their “manhood mojo back.”
For many of us, it would appear as if Herman Cain has begun spamming Americans who supported his presidential campaign. But as Ben Adler reports in a fascinating piece, Cain and other Republicans believe they’ve come up with a lucrative business plan.
While [Cain] has been particularly unabashed in his embrace of the practice, he is not the only past presidential candidate hawking sketchy products. Newt Gingrich now pings the e-mail subscribers to his Gingrich Productions with messages from an investment firm formed by a conspiracy theorist successfully sued for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mike Huckabee uses his own production company’s list to blast out links to heart-disease fixes and can’t-miss annuities.
The joke about Cain and Gingrich during the 2012 campaign was that they weren’t at all serious about their pursuits of the presidency but instead just lining up future paydays. After Huckabee, who’d parlayed a strong showing in 2008 into publishing deals and his own Fox News show, declined to run again, some wags snickered that his new livelihood must have been too hard to give up. Now all three seem to be proving the cynics right…. Collectively, Cain, Gingrich, and Huckabee are pioneering a new, more direct method for post-campaign buckraking. All it requires is some digitally savvy accomplices – and a total immunity to shame.
There’s a reason I love this Chris Hayes comment from a while back: “Much of movement conservatism is a con and the base are the marks.”
One of the striking things about the ventures launched by Cain, Gingrich, and Huckabee is the odd incentive dynamic they’ve helped create: political activities that used to be based on partisanship, ideology, and/or ego are now profit-making opportunities.
A Republican may not have any interest in actually becoming president, but he or she now knows that a presidential campaign can create a lucrative mailing list. So why not run anyway for the sake of future paychecks?
It’s not just elections, either. Last summer, for example, as conservatives prepared for their government shutdown, Brian Walsh, a former spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said, “[T]his is about political cash, not political principle.” Far-right groups were getting the base riled up, collecting contributions and email addresses, and weren’t especially concerned with the policy outcome.
More recently, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) made the rounds on conservative media, talking up a possible lawsuit he might file against the NSA. In practice, the senator was encouraging interested Americans to visit his campaign website, submit their contact information, and chip in a donation while they were there. (The lawsuit he vowed to file hasn’t materialized.)
At the intersection of politics and profit is a Republican machine in search of email addresses, clicks, and cash. It’s not that conservative causes are irrelevant; it’s just that they’re hardly the only motivation for GOP players as interested in list-building as coalition-building.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 28, 2014
“Steve King, Confused And Wrong Again”: A Wage Hike Isn’t A ‘Constitutional Violation’
The White House probably didn’t expect congressional Republicans to celebrate President Obama’s new policy raising the minimum wage for employees of government contractors. But this isn’t one of the options available to GOP lawmakers.
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) in an interview Tuesday blasted President Obama’s move to require new federal contractors to pay their employees above $10.10 a “constitutional violation.”
“We have a minimum wage. Congress has set it. For the president to simply declare I’m going to change this law that Congress has passed is unconstitutional,” King said.
The Iowa congressman suggested that there would be a legal challenge to the move, and said that the nation never “had a president with that level of audacity and that level of contempt for his own oath of office.”
On the substance, the congressman seems confused. Obama isn’t declaring a change to federal law – the federal minimum wage won’t be, and can’t be, changed through executive order.
What Obama has done – and what Steve King should have looked into before talking to reporters – is use his regulatory authority to establish conditions for businesses that contract with the government. According to the administration, Congress already gave the president this authority when lawmakers wrote current law.
Even House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who complained about the policy on economic grounds, didn’t question the legality of Obama’s move.
But King’s wrong on the politics, too.
A minimum-wage increase is wildly popular and enjoys broad support from across the political spectrum, and yet it can’t pass in Congress because of unyielding Republican opposition. The president can’t change the law, but he can help give some Americans a raise.
The more GOP officials throw a tantrum, the better it is for Obama – he’ll be the one fighting for higher wages, while Republicans position themselves on the wrong side of public opinion. It’s not exactly a winning talking point: “We’re outraged the president is doing something popular without giving us a chance to kill it.”
Indeed, King added this morning, “I think we should bring a resolution to the floor and say so, and restrain this president from his extra-constitutional behavior.”
If Obama has engaged in extra-constitutional behavior, Steve King hasn’t identified it, but if House Republicans want to start some kind of political war over a minimum-wage increase in an election year, I have a strong hunch Democrats would be delighted.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 28, 2014
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