PrairiePundit

 The Federalist Wire: ... Conservative accountability group Judicial watch issued the complaint which was received by the New York Post, which asked the Senate Ethics Committee to “immediately investigate” Whitehouse because he pushed for legislation that’s in turn benefited his wife’s environmental consulting company. The group said that there was “strong evidence” that the senator “violated ethics conflicts of interest rules.” “Senator Whitehouse seems to have stepped over the line of standard environmental legislative advocacy and used his Senate office to advance his and his wife’s personal and financial interests,” Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch said. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) who’s the chairman of the Ethics committee, and Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) who’s vice-chair, were also asked to subpoena anyone involved in the scandal if an investigation ends up taking place. This isn’t Sen. Whitehouse’s first ethical scandal either. When he was first a senator, he sought ...

 Newsmax: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi decries corporate greed, but that hasn’t stopped her from raking in as much as $30 million personally from insider stock trades on the very Big Tech companies she oversees in Congress. No surprise then that she is also blocking bipartisan efforts to prevent members of Congress from engaging in individual stock picks, according to a New York Post report. After decades in public service, Pelosi has amassed an estimated net worth of anywhere between $40 million and $252 million, and recently her family invested millions in call options — betting that the stock price would go up — on such companies as Google, Salesforce, Micron Technology and Roblox. At the same time, her critics noted that Pelosi was helping those companies by "slow-walking" Congressional efforts to rein in Big Tech. Pelosi has pushed back against such claims, asserting that members of Congress should be able to engage in the "free-market" and that there would be ...

Elizabeth Vaughn: Schiff Denies Nunes’ Request To Subpoena Ciaramella, Calls It Redundant And Unnecessary; But There Is A Silver Lining Schiff is determined to be unfair to the President and the GOP as well as coverup the corruption of the Bidens and the Obama administration. Streiff describes the corruption : ... Joe Biden undeniably intervened to call off Ukrainian prosecutors from investigating his son, Hunter. Joe Biden and undeniably engaged in years of pay-to-play conduct whereby his good offices could be purchased for putting a lucrative deal in Hunter Biden’s path. The media have shown zero interest. They may say they have reported on it but they have done so in the context of it all being a “conspiracy theory.” Look at the way the media reported on the fairly tangential association Neil Bush had with Silverado Savings and Loan to see how the media covers a Republican president who has an adult son involved in even a mildly questionable role in a very questionable ins...

Washington Examiner: President Trump pushed the argument Sunday evening that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff was complicit in "colluding" with former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and should be investigated for ethics violations. Upon returning to Washington, D.C., after a weekend trip to Florida, the president retweeted reports and commentary about Cohen being coached before his public testimony before the House Oversight Committee last month. "If Schiff wasn't coaching Cohen on how to go after Trump before his testimony and was just going over procedural issues, why didn't he invite GOP staff to sit in on these secret meetings? Schiff must be recused from future hearings while Ethics investigates his witness tampering," said ones of those tweets from Paul Sperry, a conservative author and political commentator at the right-leaning Hoover Institute. ... Trump also shared tweets from Tom Fitton, the president of conservative watchdog g...

NY Times: Settlements for Company Sins Can No Longer Aid Other Projects, Sessions Says The attorney general signed an order this week to end the practice of requiring corporate wrongdoers to make payments to outside groups or causes. Forcing people who may have broken the law to fund liberal causes is an abuse of power by the DOJ and Sessions is right to stop this kind of political extortion.  What would liberals think if the DOJ forced them to fund anti-immigration activists?  The practice appears to be another ethical lapse by the Obama administration in its Chicago way politics.

Christian Adams: North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein (D) has been accused of committing serious ethical misconduct in a brief filed before the United States Supreme Court. Lawyers for the North Carolina Legislature have asked the Supreme Court to recognize their defense of election integrity laws such as voter ID laws and ignore Stein's attempt to derail an appeal to preserve the laws. The pleadings to the Supreme Court accuse Attorney General Stein of severe ethical misconduct, misconduct for which many lawyers have been disbarred. Before Stein won the 2016 election and became North Carolina's attorney general, he was also a fact witness at trial for those attacking North Carolina’s election integrity statutes in federal court. Lawyers are prohibited by ethical rules from acting as both a fact witness and an attorney of record in any case. The proper course for Stein was to recuse himself, not file a motion to dismiss a Supreme Court appeal to preserve voter I...

Washington Free Beacon: Director of the Office of Government Ethics Walter M. Shaub donated to President Obama before his appointment and defended Hillary Clinton’s decision to not disclose paid speeches to the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state. Shaub, the head of the little-known ethics office, has been on the attack against President-elect Donald J. Trump for months. Shaub has called Trump’s plan to sign over control of his business to his sons “meaningless,” and engaged in tweet storms from the official ethics Twitter account encouraging Trump to divest. ... Shaub struck a different tone when testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in December 2015, when he was asked about Secretary Clinton’s failure to disclose six-figure dollar speeches her husband gave to foreign governments and donors while they had interests before the State Department. “The statute is a very long, very detailed statute,” he told Committee Chairman Ja...

Washington Post: Ethics office warns that Trump, GOP are rushing Cabinet confirmations The director of the Office of Government Ethics said that plans to confirm President-elect Donald Trump’s top Cabinet choices before background checks are complete are unprecedented and have overwhelmed government investigators responsible for the reviews. The office appears to be slow rolling appointments at the behest of the Democrats who want to drag out the process.  The office appears to be blatantly anti-Trump .  They are definitely not looking non-partisan.

Washington Post: Trump’s business empire raises concerns about foreign influence A Post analysis found at least 111 of Donald Trump’s companies have done business in 18 countries and territories. With his refusal to sell or set up a blind trust to combat conflicts of interest, policy and ethics experts are scrambling to assess the potential dangers of public rule by a leader with a vast web of private business deals. With the Clinton's their only business was fund raising and selling access to the Secretary of State and the candidate for President, yet it did not stop the Post from a full throated endorsement. Trump is going to have to do something to demonstrate he is not selling his office.  He is going to have to establish a degree of separation from those running his business whether it is his kids or a blind trust. It appears the best way to interest the media is ethics is to elect a Republican.

Washington Post: Release of transcript stokes tensions ahead of Clinton’s Benghazi testimony Democrats published the 307-page transcript of Hillary Clinton's former chief-of-staff Cheryl Mills's comments over Republican objections. In a trial setting what the Democrats have done would be blatantly unethical.  They are trying to help Hillary Clinton avoid inconsistencies that could trip her up.  In fact Congress should consider referring the matter to the ethics committee.

Houston Chronicle: In a vote along party lines, the Texas Senate on Wednesday tentatively approved a measure that would accomplish a longtime goal of statehouse politicians: stripping the Travis County District Attorney's Office of its power to investigate them for ethics crimes. The adopted version of Senate Bill 10 moves the Public Integrity Unit to the Texas Rangers, and would allow any ethics charges filed against statewide politicians and lawmakers, state employees and lobbyists to be returned to their home counties for prosecution. In the approved version, state Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, removed a provision that would have allowed the Attorney General to oversee the investigations. That provision had proven controversial since Attorney General Ken Paxton earlier had been the subject of an inquiry by Travis County's Public Integrity Unit. ... The current unit appears to lack integrity.  It has become a vehicle for liberals in Travis County to criminalize their polit...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife Washington Post: Numerous times this year, members of Congress have held fundraisers and collected big checks while they are taking critical steps to write new laws, despite warnings that such actions could create ethics problems. The campaign donations often came from contributors with major stakes riding on the lawmakers' actions. For three weeks in June, for instance, the members of a joint House and Senate committee worked to draft final rules for regulating the financial industry in the wake of its 2008 meltdown. During that time, the 35 members of the drafting committee collected $440,000 in donations from that same industry, which was then lobbying heavily for looser rules. Earlier this month, the chairman of the Senate committee overseeing tax policy, Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), gave himself a birthday-party fundraiser - on the same day that the chamber took its first vote on an $858 billion tax package that would provide breaks...

Image via Wikipedia Washington Post: Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) pleaded with a House panel Monday to delay his long-awaited public trial on corruption charges , saying he needed time to find a new lawyer , but his request was rejected and the session went ahead without him. The panel later deemed the charges against Rangel to be "uncontested" and decided to deliberate on them, dispensing with the trial phase of the case. In the hearing, conducted by an eight-member panel of Rangel's congressional peers, Rangel faced allegations that he broke congressional rules in his personal finances and his fundraising efforts for a New York college. He and his previous legal team parted ways last month. "I object to the proceeding," Rangel told the House panel. "With all due respect, since I don't have counsel to advise me, I'm going to have to excuse myself from these proceedings." He said he cannot afford a lawyer at present because his ...

Nate Beeler examines Speaker Pelosi's commitment to House ethics. Click on the image for a larger view.

Washington Times: Wall Street executives have pleaded economic ruin, secured hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer assistance and been pilloried for their business excesses. But none of that has curbed their appetite for doling out political donations - or the willingness of politicians to accept the largesse. A Washington Times analysis found that executives and employee-funded political action committees of banking companies that received bailout money have donated more than $2 million to members of Congress and other politicians since lawmakers approved the federal rescue of America's financial system in October. The PACs linked to the top 20 recipients of federal rescue funds have spent a combined $1.5 million on donations since Congress approved the bailout while employees of the top 10 recipients of bailout money have donated an additional $726,070, Federal Election Commission records showed. The financial industry has long been a dominant political giver. For in...

Politico: Republican Rep. John R. Carter of Texas offered legislation Wednesday that would require Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel to relinquish his gavel until the ethics committee completes an investigation into Rangel’s finances. Under the rules of the House, members must consider Carter's resolution by next Tuesday, forcing Democrats to confront Rangel’s ethics in the same week they will try to move the massive economic stimulus and a handful of late appropriations bills. The House ethics committee is in the middle of a lengthy investigation into Rangel's personal finances and his fundraising on behalf of a New York nonprofit that bears his name. “It brings me no joy to introduce this legislation concerning a colleague,” Carter said in a statement accompanying his resolution. “But this body has a high duty and obligation to conduct itself in a way that restores public confidence in the integrity of this institution. When charges of this magnitude are pen...

Washington Times: A renewed ethics probe of Rep. Charles B. Rangel of New York poses an embarrassing distraction for House Democrats, as the Ways and Means Committee that he leads will oversee House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's plans for an $825 billion economic rescue and a tax increase on wealthy Americans. The slow-moving investigation of Mr. Rangel's home finances, unpaid taxes and dodgy fundraising is now in the hands of Rep. Zoe Lofgren, California Democrat and the new chairman of the Committee on Standards and Ethical Conduct. She has not signaled whether the committee will take up the probe begun last year or start anew. Either way, the inquiry overshadows Mr. Rangel as he takes a key position, as head of the House's tax-writing panel, in tackling the recession and a looming battle over tax increases. "It is more of a distraction because of the economic shape we are in, and so much of it is before his committee," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of ...

Debra Saunders: In July, federal authorities indicted Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, on corruption charges on the grounds that Alaska's Prince of Earmarks concealed hundreds of thousands of dollars of gifts and improvements to his Alaska home provided by a powerful oil services company. Also this summer, amid the mortgage meltdown, newspapers reported that a number of senators -- including Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.; Kent Conrad, D-N.D.; and Barack Obama, D.-Ill. -- were the beneficiaries of sweetheart home loans. In June, the Senate Ethics Committee began an initial look into Dodd's and Conrad's discounted Countrywide Financial VIP loans, as is fitting. Meanwhile, with all of the ethics stink bombs lurking in Washington, the committee, chaired by California Democrat Barbara Boxer, is aiming its guns at Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., for "a serious violation of Senate rules." Coburn's bad? An obstetrician by profession, Coburn won...

Washington Post: Keeping momentum on ethics reforms is proving tough for House Democratic leaders, who are struggling to sell lawmakers on a proposal for overhauling House ethics enforcement, which is part of the party's pledge to improve accountability in Congress. A week that began with the indictment of Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.) on bribery and racketeering charges ended on Friday with failure to forge Democratic consensus on plans for an independent ethics overseer, despite a sense of urgency among party leaders, lawmakers involved said. As envisioned, the independent, bipartisan ethics panel would, for the first time in a decade, give non-lawmakers an avenue for lodging ethics complaints against lawmakers. The new panel would have no subpoena power and would leave enforcement action with the current committee. Even so, unveiling of the new committee has been repeatedly delayed, as proponents work to quell dissension. ... The panel would vet complaints and refer them to ...