West Virginia Democrat is Scrutinized
Related Topics
"Pookie" pookie18...@optonline.net
West Virginia Democrat is Scrutinized Mollohan Has Close Ties to Groups Handling His District's Appropriations By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, May 15, 2006; A01 Starting in the 1990s, Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (D-W.Va.) chose an unusual way to funnel federal funds into his poverty-ridden district. He set up a network of nonprofit organizations to administer the millions of dollars he directed to such public endeavors as high-tech research and historic preservation.
Over the same period, Mollohan's personal fortunes soared. From 2000 to 2004, his ***ets grew from no more than $565,000 to at least $6.3 million.
The partners in his rapidly expanding real estate empire included the head of one of these nonprofit groups and the owner of a local company for which he arranged substantial federal aid.
Mollohan used his seat on the House Appropriations Committee to secure more than $150 million for five nonprofit groups. One of the groups is headed by a former aide with whom Mollohan bought $2 million worth of property on Bald Head Island, N.C.
Controversy over this blending of commerce and legislation has triggered a federal probe, cost Mollohan his position on the House ethics committee and undermined the Democrats' effort to portray the GOP as the party of corruption because of the Jack Abramoff scandal. As early as today, the 12-term congressman will admit that he misstated some transactions in his congressional filings, according to Mollohan staffers.
"Mollohan has earmarked tens of millions of dollars to groups ***ociated with his own business partners. That immediately raises the question whether these funds were allocated to promote the public good or to promote his interests and the interests of his partners," said Ken Boehm, chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative watchdog group. "He also got very rich very quick, and that suggests a relationship that is suspect if not corrupt." Mollohan is now engaged in the most arduous election of his career.
Republicans have recruited Chris Wakim, a state legislator and Persian Gulf War veteran, to run against him, and have sent President Bush and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) into the district to campaign. To fight back, Mollohan is raising much more money than ever, is visiting the district more often, and has hired a nationally known media consultant to help craft his commercials.
During a trip home last week to northern West Virginia, Mollohan was questioned at length by a radio interviewer from Weirton about his business connections. But everywhere else, Mollohan -- the son of a longtime congressman and a cousin of a former senator -- was welcomed as a patron of the state. At a huge police training event in Moundsville, a federal employee thanked him for providing the money for "everything you see today." In Morgantown, at a meeting about a missing-child alert system that his legislation had underwritten, he received a standing ovation.
In an interview, Mollohan said he is unapologetic and proud of the thousands of jobs he has brought to West Virginia and that, legally speaking, everything he has done to secure them is "squeaky clean." But he acknowledged that his actions might look incriminating and that he may have had an ethical "blind spot" that prevented him from questioning whether he, as a government official and vice chairman of the ethics panel, should have invested with such close ***ociates.
"I would have done things differently," he said as he drove through West Virginia's northern panhandle. "It puts you in a position where people could say there's something untoward going on." The House ethics committee warns lawmakers to avoid exactly those kinds of situations. Its Web site admonishes federal officials not to accept favors or benefits "in circumstances that might create the appearance of influencing the performance of official duties." Mollohan's transactions -- first reported last month by the Wall Street Journal -- were uncovered by the National Legal and Policy Center, a small research institute in Virginia that gets some of its funding from the politically conservative Scaife family of Pittsburgh. In March, NLPC turned over 500 pages of documents to the FBI alleging that Mollohan engaged in nine years of false reporting and the appearance of impropriety in his business contacts with contractors.
As a result, Mollohan, 63, faces a widening federal investigation. The FBI has notified his nonprofit organizations that they will be subpoenaed soon and, according to Mollohan, a subpoena has already been served on a D.C.
real estate company in which he has invested. In addition, Mollohan plans to divulge that he misstated on House financial disclosure forms the amount of loans and income from some of his real estate holdings.
Mollohan calls the charges against him inaccurate and partisan. He says NLPC is part of an orchestrated effort by Republicans to undermine the Democrats' anti-corruption message -- a charge NLPC denies -- and to transform West Virginia's congressional delegation from majority Democratic to majority Republican. He also ***erts that he is being punished for leading the ethics committee when it sanctioned former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) three times in a single year.
Mollohan has served in the House without serious challenge since 1983. He said he knew he wanted to be a congressman from the moment he stood on the House floor in 1953 when his father, Robert H. Mollohan, was first sworn in.
"It was like an imprinting," Mollohan said. His first election in 1982 was also formative. The state was in a deep recession, and Mollohan pledged then to make his first priority the diversification of the state's coal-and-steel-dependent economy.
The engine of that initiative, he determined from the beginning, would have to be the federal government. "Immediately I started to try to understand the government marketplace," he said.
From his perch on the Appropriations Committee, Mollohan has directed hundreds of millions of dollars into his district for that purpose. His colleague, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), a master of such "earmarking," was responsible for relocating to the state large facilities of NASA and the FBI, among other agencies. But Mollohan was a major player, too. His projects have made him, in effect, one of the region's leading industries.
In his home town of Fairmont, near Morgantown, for example, federal funds allocated at Mollohan's behest have purchased 500 acres for an office park that includes the Alan B. Mollohan Innovation Center, an office building for high-tech firms; a taxpayer-financed, $136 million building (complete with swimming pool and spa) that its manager hopes will house a federal agency; and other offices filled primarily with companies with federal contracts.
The congressman brought in so many taxpayer dollars that he decided to create a special set of organizations to oversee them. These nonprofit groups include the West Virginia High Technology Consortium Foundation, which manages the office park, and the Vandalia Heritage Foundation, which focuses on refurbishing real estate.
The practice of setting up such entities is rare and has been widely criticized as a mutual back-scratching exercise. "These types of organizations permit lawmakers to reward their own people, and themselves, without having to pay federal taxes," said Thomas A. Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste, a watchdog group.
Mollohan defends the groups as the best way to control the appropriations he sends back home. He also said they were needed because it was hard to find people he could trust to run the projects. "There is a limited pool of people who are committed to a service mission," he said.
To head Vandalia Heritage, Mollohan tapped Laura K. Kuhns, who for years was a key aide in his congressional office. But in addition to watching over real estate improvements that Mollohan funded, Kuhns donated personally to a Mollohan political committee and invested with him in North Carolina real estate. The Mollohans and the Kuhnses own four lots on Bald Head Island and built neighboring beachfront homes (though Mollohan is now selling the house to pay debts).
Mollohan denies that he raked off any of the federal funds that went to his state while his personal portfolio ballooned. Rather, he said, his newfound wealth is due primarily to the run-up in value of his family's ownership of 27 condos in a Foggy Bottom high-rise. By leveraging that ***et, he said, he has been able to buy other properties, usually with the help of loans, in North Carolina and West Virginia.
One of those properties is a $900,000, 300-acre farm along West Virginia's Cheat River that Mollohan purchased last year with a childhood friend and business ***ociate, Dale R. McBride. A donor to Mollohan's campaigns, McBride is active in the high-tech consortium, a director of the Robert H.
Mollohan Family Charitable Foundation (located in the Fairmont office park) and a pleader for taxpayer financing.
McBride asked Mollohan to earmark money for the U.S. space program to buy a special lightweight pallet that McBride's FMW Composite Systems Inc. had the expertise to produce. Mollohan complied, and FMW got a $1.5 million contract in 2005. That same year Mollohan and McBride became 50-50 partners in the farm.
The federal contract and the farm acquisition "were completely independent," McBride said. But he does understand with "regret" that the two are being examined together.
Mollohan promises a report soon that will explain how he so quickly became a multimillionaire. (Cattle futures? ;-) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/14/AR200...
kyld ...@yahoo.com
If he broke the law, he should get punished under the full extent of the law. Now, do you think the Rove indictment will be announced today?
"Pookie" pookie18...@optonline.net
Not sure, but I don't think so...
Rove Indictment Report Denied By Staff Reporter of the Sun May 15, 2006 A spokesman for a top White House aide under scrutiny in a criminal leak probe, Karl Rove, yesterday vigorously denied an Internet report that the political adviser to President Bush was told that he had been indicted on charges of perjury and lying to investigators.
"The story is a complete fabrication," the spokesman for Mr. Rove, Mark Corallo, told The New York Sun. "It is both malicious and disgraceful." http://www.nysun.com/article/32727 The Rove Indictment Posted by: Dale Franks on Sunday, May 14, 2006 Byron York, who reports for Captitol Hill and National Review has spent the day trying to run down the Karl Rove indictment story.
According to Jason Leopold's original story at truthout.org-a lefty, indymedia-style web site: Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than half a day Friday at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm representing Karl Rove.
During the course of that meeting, Fitzgerald served attorneys for former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove with an indictment charging the embattled White House official with perjury and lying to investigators related to his role in the CIA leak case, and instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 business hours to get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said Saturday morning.
No other news service-or perhaps I should drop the "other" from the preceding phrase-has run with the story over the weekend. That's odd, since it would be a major political story.
According to York, however: I talked with Rove defense spokesman Mark Corallo, who told me the story was completely baseless. Part of our conversation: Did Patrick Fitzgerald come to Patton Boggs for 15 hours Friday?
No.
Did he come to Patton Boggs for any period of time Friday?
No.
Did he meet anywhere else with Karl Rove's representatives?
No.
Did he communicate in any way with Karl Rove's representatives?
No.
Did he inform Rove or Rove's representatives that Rove had been indicted?
No.
So there seems to be nothing to the story, certainly nothing which any other reporter has seen fit to report. Which raises a question: What is going on here?
That's a very good question. Is Mr. Leopold actually in touch with anyone important enough to know what is going on? Is he being snowed? Is he making it up? And why would he run with such a declarative, ostensibly fact-jammed story, when even the basic facts appear to be incorrect?
Very odd.
http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=3870 Lunatic Left "Reporter" Claims Rove Has Been Indicted May 13th, 2006 If you check the news wires and other DNC mouthpieces like Chris Mathews and Zsa Zsa Huffington's site, you will see variations on this "scoop" from the propaganda outlet that hilariously calls itself Truthout: Karl Rove Indicted on Charges of Perjury, Lying to Investigators By Jason Leopold t r u t h o u t | Report Saturday 13 May 2006 Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than half a day Friday at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm representing Karl Rove.
During the course of that meeting, Fitzgerald served attorneys for former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove with an indictment charging the embattled White House official with perjury and lying to investigators related to his role in the CIA leak case, and instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 hours to get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said Saturday morning.
Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, did not return a call for comment. Sources said Fitzgerald was in Washington, DC, Friday and met with Luskin for about 15 hours to go over the charges against Rove, which include perjury and lying to investigators about how and when Rove discovered that Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert CIA operative and whether he shared that information with reporters, sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said.
It was still unknown Saturday whether Fitzgerald charged Rove with a more serious obstruction of justice charge. Sources close to the case said Friday that it appeared very likely that an obstruction charge against Rove would be included with charges of perjury and lying to investigators.
An announcement by Fitzgerald is expected to come this week, sources close to the case said. However, the day and time is unknown. Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the special prosecutor was unavailable for comment. In the past, Samborn said he could not comment on the case.
The grand jury hearing evidence in the Plame Wilson case met Friday on other matters while Fitzgerald spent the entire day at Luskin's office. The meeting was a closely guarded secret and seems to have taken place without the knowledge of the media.
As TruthOut reported Friday evening, Rove told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials, that he will be indicted in the CIA leak case and will immediately resign his White House job when the special counsel publicly announces the charges against him, according to sources.
Details of Rove's discussions with the president and Bolten have spread through the corridors of the White House, where low-level staffers and senior officials were trying to determine how the indictment would impact an administration that has been mired in a number of high-profile political scandals for nearly a year, said a half-dozen White House aides and two senior officials who work at the Republican National Committee.
Speaking on condition of anonymity Friday night, sources confirmed Rove's indictment was imminent. These individuals requested anonymity saying they were not authorized to speak publicly about Rove's situation. A spokesman in the White House press office said they would not comment on "wildly speculative rumors." Rove's announcement to President Bush and Bolten comes more than a month after he alerted the new chief of staff to a meeting his attorney had with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in which Fitzgerald told Luskin that his case against Rove would soon be coming to a close and that he was leaning toward charging Rove with perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to investigators, according to sources close to the investigation.
A few weeks after he spoke with Fitzgerald, Luskin arranged for Rove to return to the grand jury for a fifth time to testify in hopes of fending off an indictment related to Rove's role in the CIA leak, sources said.
That meeting was followed almost immediately by an announcement by newly-appointed White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten of changes in the responsibilities of some White House officials, including Rove, who was stripped of his policy duties and would no longer hold the title of deputy White House chief of staff.
The White House said Rove would focus on the November elections and his change in status in no way reflected his fifth appearance before the grand jury or the possibility of an indictment.
But since Rove testified two weeks ago, the White House has been coordinating a response to what is sure to be the biggest political scandal it has faced thus far: the loss of a key political operative who has been instrumental in shaping White House policy on a wide range of domestic issues.
Rove testified that he first found out about Plame Wilson from reading a newspaper report in July 2003 and only after the story was published did he share damaging information about her CIA status with other reporters.
However, evidence has surfaced during the course of the two-year-old investigation that shows Rove spoke with at least two reporters about Plame Wilson prior to the publication of the column.
The explanation Rove provided to the grand jury - that he was dealing with more urgent White House matters and therefore forgot - has not convinced Fitzgerald that Rove has been entirely truthful in his testimony and resulted in the indictment.
Some White House staffers said it's the uncertainty of Rove's status in the leak case that has made it difficult for the administration's domestic policy agenda and that the announcement of an indictment and Rove's subsequent resignation, while serious, would allow the administration to move forward on a wide range of issues.
"We need to start fresh and we can't do that with the uncertainty of Karl' s case hanging over our heads," said one White House aide. "There's no doubt that it will be front page news if and when (an indictment) happens. But eventually it will become old news quickly. The key issue here is that the president or Mr. Bolten respond to the charges immediately, make a statement and then move on to other important policy issues and keep that as the main focus going forward." Before anyone starts popping the cork on the champagne, it should be remembered that the author of this piece has been previously exposed as a notorious fantasist. (You can read Leopold's own attempts to spin the collapse of his journalistic ...
"Pookie" pookie18...@optonline.net
No, you make us laugh...tell us about Delay's conviction...
kyld ...@yahoo.com
DUI Kennedy Car crash Coverup wrote: Well, I'll trade you one of those for a posting from you about how Rove must be arrested. You go first and I'll follow suit.
"Pookie" pookie18...@optonline.net
http://homepage.mac.com/mkoldys/iblog/C1481761327/E20060514231830/ind...
"Jebus Saves" GeorgeWB...@drunkencokeheadedTraitorousAWOLCOWARDBITCHES.com
"DUI Kennedy Car crash Coverup" <DUI Kennedy @ Senate .gov> wrote in message ...
Mollohan is a typical corrupt politician. He's NOT THE PRESIDENT, CHIEF OF STAFF OR VICE PRESIDENT. Mollohan is nothing, he hasn't committed treason.
| To Top |