The Daily Beast has learned that federal investigators are now interviewing former Bachmann campaign staffers nationwide about alleged intentional campaign-finance violations. The investigators are working on behalf of the Office of Congressional Ethics, which probes reported improprieties by House members and their staffs and then can refer cases to the House Ethics Committee.
“I have been interviewed by investigators,” says Peter Waldron, a former Bachmann staffer who’s embroiled in his own fight with his former boss, involving his allegations of pay-to-play politics and improper payments by the campaign—making him one of several members of Bachmann’s inner circle who’ve fallen out with the woman they once hoped would become commander in chief. While he was careful to avoid specifics in regard to the investigating body, Waldron said that “investigators came [and] interviewed me and are interviewing other staff members across the country.”
Two other former staffers confirmed the existence of the investigation this weekend, and on Monday Bachmann’s campaign counsel, William McGinley, of the high-powered firm Patton Boggs, confirmed that the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) was looking into the congresswoman’s presidential campaign last year.
Urgent Action: tell Senators not to fast track coal exports
Big Coal and its allies are attempting to sneak through a last-minute budget amendment to stop federal agencies from limiting the greenhouse gas emissions of exported coal and other fuels. Right now agencies are legally bound to consider the health and climate impacts of greenhouse gases when reviewing export proposals — including coal.
But under Senator Barrasso’s (R-WY) amendment (#184), agencies would be barred from considering environmental impacts from exporting coal or other fossil fuels.
If this amendment passes there will be nothing to stop Big Coal from sending millions of tons of U.S. coal to be burned in China. And we’ll all pay the climate and health consequences.
Here’s more background on the issue:
- Under the National Environmental Policy Act, an agency that issues a permit for a major project involving the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels has to consider the impacts of burning those fuels on the health and well-being of Americans, regardless of whether those fuels are burned in the U.S. or whether they are exported and burned somewhere else in the world
- When it comes to greenhouse gases, the impacts on Americans are exactly the same wherever the fuel is burned, because carbon pollution spreads globally and respects no boundaries.
- But under this new amendment the agencies would be forced to ignore the impacts on Americans, just because the fuels were exported.
- All this does is protect the profits of the big corporations that export fossil fuels, at the expense of the health and well-being of the American people.
Congress passes Monsanto Protection Act, All hands on deck!
We regret to inform you, but today Congress succeeded in passing Section 735, aka the Monsanto Protection Act, in the Continuing Resolution spending bill. Once again, Monsanto and the biotech industry have used their lobbying power to undermine your basic rights. We need you to contact Congress and tell them you are outraged. With the Senate passage of the Monsanto Protection Act, biotech lobbyists are one step closer to making sure that their new GMO crops can evade any serious scientific or regulatory review.
This dangerous provision, which we’re calling the Monsanto Protection Act, strips judges of their constitutional mandate to protect consumer and farmer rights and the environment, while opening up the floodgates for the planting of new untested genetically engineered crops, endangering farmers, citizens and the environment.
We are asking that you take action here and then call Congress to shut down their phone lines until Section 735 is removed from the CR before the President signs. Join us in putting a stop to the Monsanto Protection Act!
Michele Bachmann Has Gone Too Far! Tell John Boehner She Should Be Removed from the Intelligence Committee Immediately!
In service to ugly Islamophobic fear mongering, Rep. Michele Bachmann continues unabated in her unfounded and irresponsible attacks on dedicated public servants — a witch hunt that has targeted Huma Abedin, a key aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and now includes allegations that President Obama may be aiding the rise of global Sharia law.
Conspiracy theories and religious McCarthyism should have no place in our government, especially in the House Intelligence Committee, on which Rep. Bachmann sits.
Please remove Rep. Bachmann from her seat on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence immediately. Members of the House Intelligence Committee are entrusted with classified information that affects the safety and security of all Americans. That information should not be in the hands of anyone with such a disregard for honesty, misunderstanding of national security, and lack of respect for his or her fellow public servants.
When law enforcement officers recover a gun and serial number, workers at the bureau’s National Tracing Center here — a windowless warehouse-style building on a narrow road outside town — begin making their way through a series of phone calls, asking first the manufacturer, then the wholesaler and finally the dealer to search their files to identify the buyer of the firearm.
About a third of the time, the process involves digging through records sent in by companies that have closed, in many cases searching by hand through cardboard boxes filled with computer printouts, hand-scrawled index cards or even water-stained sheets of paper.
In an age when data is often available with a few keystrokes, the A.T.F. is forced to follow this manual routine because the idea of establishing a central database of gun transactions has been rejected by lawmakers in Congress, who have sided with the National Rifle Association, which argues that such a database poses a threat to the Second Amendment. In other countries, gun rights groups argue, governments have used gun registries to confiscate the firearms of law-abiding citizens.
We reached out to all 31 pro-gun rights senators in the new congress to invite them on the program to share their views on the subject this morning,”
”We had no takers.
He had run Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign in his district, where Kennedy won by 40,000 votes. In October 1963, he was the only one of nine Southerners on the judiciary committee to vote for the Kennedy administration’s civil rights bill.
When Johnson took up the bill after Kennedy’s death, Mr. Brooks was one of 11 out of 92 Southerners to vote for it on the House floor in 1964.
President Richard M. Nixon, he loathed. Mr. Brooks said he would have voted to impeach him on Jan. 21, 1969, but it “would not have looked good” to do it the day he was inaugurated, Jan. 20. Five and a half years later, as a ranking member of the judiciary committee, he helped draft the articles of impeachment that prompted Nixon to resign.
He was also a leader in the House investigation of President Ronald Reagan for trading arms for the hostages in Iran and using the proceeds to finance the right-leaning Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
S.3525 Target Practice and Marksmanship Training Support Act
I am writing as your constituent in the 51st Congressional district of California. I am writing as your constituent in the 51st Congressional district of California. I oppose S.3525 - Target Practice and Marksmanship Training Support Act, and am tracking it using OpenCongress.org, the free public resource website for government transparency and accountability.
The summary of the bill states that it “Amends the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 to direct the Secretary of the Interior to issue a permit for the importation of any polar bear part (other than an internal organ) from a polar bear taken in a sport hunt in Canada to any person who meets specified requirements.” As I recall ,we have done little to curb climate change - one of the most glaring examples of that is the reduction of the Artic Ice Sheet which is the polar bear’s habitat. This animal is endangered. I object to encouraging hunting of this majestic animal where it is not acting out one’s cultural heritage.
