A2 Politics & The Nation


At Blagojevich trial, ‘dirty schemes’ in detail ........................................A3 National Digest Pay scandal draws state-level scrutiny..................................................A3


The World


A test of power and popularity ...............................................................A6 European Union imposes new economic sanctions against Iran .......A6 Foreign Digest Sailors took wrong turn, NATO says......................................................A6


Economy & Business


GE finds itself on wrong side of Obama’s defense agenda.................A10 Basel panel reaches deal on bank rules ................................................A11 Business Digest E.U. opens two investigations on IBM...................................................A11


CORRECTIONS


 Chris Cillizza’s Monday Fix column in the July 26 A-section, about political candidates who use their personal wealth in at- tempts to get elected, incorrectly cited Terry McAuliffe as an exam- ple. The column said that McAu- liffe spent millions in his unsuc- cessful 2009 bid for the Demo- cratic gubernatorial nomination in Virginia; in fact, he spent none of his own money in the cam- paign.


 Ezra Klein’s Economic & Do- mestic Policy column in the July 18 Business section, about where the next financial crisis might


·· E-mail corrections@washpost.com.


arise, incorrectly described Gary Gorton as an economist at Princeton University. Gorton, who was quoted talking about the lack of the equivalent of de- posit insurance for institutional investors, is a professor of fi- nance at Yale University.


 In the On Leadership feature in the July 18 Business section, a panelist incorrectly referred to the late Sir William Osler as Brit- ish. Osler, a physician who was cited as saying that medicine could be a science if every pa- tient were identical, was Canadi- an.


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or a man who came to power by harnessing the potential of the Internet,


President Obama has been oddly out of sorts in recent days as the medium turned against him. Last week, his advisers


embarrassed themselves when they fired a mid-level Agriculture Department official over a supposedly racist video clip on a right-wing blog — only to apologize and offer to rehire her when they learned that the innocent woman had been the victim of selective excerpting. Then, on Monday afternoon, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs found himself trying to tell the world to pay no attention to those 91,000 classified documents about the war in Afghanistan just published online. “In terms of broad revelations, there aren’t any that we see in these documents,” the presidential spokesman said of the WikiLeaks document dump. And: “I’m — I’m unaware of a list of concerns that would be different today than they were a week ago, based on what we’ve seen.”


And: “I don’t — again, I don’t —


I don’t see broad new revelations that we weren’t either concerned about and working through this time a week ago.” If those variations of the old “move along, nothing to see here” defense weren’t sufficient, Gibbs offered up the rare triple-negative combination denial: “I don’t know that what is being said, or what is being reported, isn’t something that hasn’t been discussed fairly publicly.” So why did John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign


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Relations Committee, say the leaked documents “raise serious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan” and “may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent”? The question left Gibbs tongue-tied. “No, no, let’s — well, let’s — let me first be clear about —I think it is hard — would be hard to identify anybody that has done as much as Senator Kerry has,” he offered. Ah, okay, then. What Gibbs could not say was


that Obama was being brought down by the same medium that made him. During and after Obama’s 2008 campaign, his advisers crowed about how they had found their way around what campaign manager David Plouffe called “the snarky media filter.” In a typical iteration, Plouffe bragged, “We reach more people when we send an e-mail than on most nights watch ‘NBC Nightly News’ and all the cable news channels combined, including Fox.” After helping to undermine the position of the media, Obama and his aides are now feeling the consequences of the decline. When blogger Andrew Breitbart posted a video that unfairly maligned USDA official


Shirley Sherrod, the false story caused an Internet firestorm. The much-maligned mainstream media, including Fox, began making phone calls and within hours cast doubt on Breitbart’s account, but by then a panicked Obama administration had already fired the innocent woman.


With the WikiLeaks episode,


likewise, Obama officials learned that the unfiltered Internet has no special concern for America’s national security. When news organizations report on leaked documents, they typically give the government a chance to argue for withholding certain details — names of sources and operational details, for example —that could endanger U.S. troops and their allies. The New York Times — which, along with two European newspapers, was given a preview of the documents —decided not to publish names and other details that could compromise American operatives and their informants. The Times “handled this story in a responsible way,” Gibbs told reporters, but the WikiLeaks people, who oppose the war in Afghanistan, “are not in touch with us.” After Gibbs sent a message through the Times reporters, WikiLeaks reportedly delayed the release of 15,000


TUESDAY, JULY 27, 2010 The Web giveth, and the Web taketh away


documents to redact names. But Gibbs was at a


disadvantage in responding to the huge document dump, because, as he pointed out, “nobody in this government was afforded the opportunity to see what they do or don’t have.” The problem for Gibbs is, he wasn’t dealing with one of those news filters. “The New York Times didn’t publish the documents,” he said. “WikiLeaks published the documents.” That left the press secretary with only one defense, and it wasn’t very viable: The documents had revealed American officials’ suspicions that Pakistan’s military intelligence has been aiding the Taliban insurgency, but all Gibbs could do was recommend that people avert their gaze. “The coverage I read off of the


news documents doesn’t, I think, materially change the challenges that we have,” he argued. “I don’t think the challenges that you [could] have listed on a piece of paper this time last week are, quite honestly, different, based on what we read in these documents at this time this week.” Such reasoning didn’t impress


CNN’s Ed Henry, who asked whether “these documents then suggest that this war is too far gone.” “No,” Gibbs stammered. “No, I


don’t — I don’t — I don’t in any way think the documents suggest that.” But he did admit that “nobody’s here to declare mission accomplished. You’ve not heard that phrase uttered or emitted by us.”


Score another win over Obama for the unfiltered media. danamilbank@washpost.com


Democrats face dilemma in Rangel trial


Concern grows that ethic proceedings may affect midterm elections


by Paul Kane House Democrats continued to


struggle with how to handle the pending ethics trial of Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), re- turning to the Capitol on Monday as unclear on the matter as when they left last week. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)


and Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters Monday that they had not spoken


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to Rangel about the mat- ter. Neither indicated any knowledge of how the former Ways and Means Committee chairman plans to han- dle the potentially ex- plosive ethics trial. It is slated to begin Thursday with a hearing, at which the corruption allega- tions will be detailed. “People will wait and see how


Charles Rangel


that plays out,” Pelosi said. “The committee has made its an- nouncement and [outlined] its timetable, and I think that we just have to wait to see how that plays out. Hoyer said: “The process is working as it was intended to do, even for a very powerful member of Congress.” The indecision over how to handle the matter comes as some party strategists are privately hoping that Rangel will reach a settlement or announce his resig- nation before Thursday, to avoid public scrutiny of a messy trial: It would resume in mid-September, just before the November mid- term elections. Aides were brac- ing to see whether more Demo- crats in vulnerable districts would call for his resignation, as Rep. Betty Sutton (Ohio) did Friday. Freshman Rep. Kathy Dahl-


kemper (Pa.) announced Monday that she will donate $14,000 she received from Rangel to charity. Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D-Ind.), who is running for the Senate, had an- nounced Friday that he would do the same.


According to Repub- lican estimates, more than $588,000 in Ran- gel-related donations has been returned or do- nated to charity since the ethics committee repri- manded him in February for an unrelated probe regarding his acceptance of corporate-financed


travel. The current investigation in- volves his personal finances, in- cluding his living in rent-con- trolled apartments in Harlem and his belated disclosure of hun- dreds of thousands of dollars on financial forms. It also focuses on how he raised


money for the wing of a New York college in his honor. An investiga- tive subcommittee announced Thursday that it had found that Rangel broke unnamed House rules, and another committee was set up to conduct what amounts to a trial on the charges. The National Republican Con- gressional Committee issued more than 40 news releases crit- icizing lawmakers who had not returned their Rangel-linked do- nations, such as Rep. Dan Maffei (D-N.Y.), a former Ways and Means aide who has collected more than $80,000 through Ran- gel. But Republicans have been careful not to call for Rangel’s res- ignation, hopeful that he will fight out the public trial throughout September and place Democrats in an uncomfortable spot. As the investigation unfolded, from fall 2008 through last


Some party strategists hope he will reach a settlement or will retire.


spring, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) offered numerous resolutions calling for Rangel, 80, to surrender his chair- manship. Boehner has now gone mum on the issue. “The ethics committee has its job to do; I’m sure they’ll do it,” he told reporters Monday. Rangel could reach a settle- ment before Thursday’s prelimi- nary hearing. His only other op- tion for avoiding a trial is to re- sign. In public statements since last week’s committee announce- ment, Rangel has given every in- dication that he is hunkering down for a fight. Rangel and his lawyers still consider settlement a possibility, according to a source who is close to the Rangel team and is familiar with the settlement talks. There have been no active or face-to-face talks in recent days, however. “I’ve put in 80 years on these


streets, minus four with the Army,” Rangel said at a rally in Harlem over the weekend. “They really don’t think this thing is the most important thing to them.” kanep@washpost.com


Staff writer Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.


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