A2 Politics & The Nation
BP to cut its U.S. tax bill by $10 billion .................................................A4 In closing arguments, disparate takes on Blagojevich’s intelligence ..A7 Concerns about compliance could sink arms treaty ............................A9
The World
Leaked documents all part of U.S. plot, Pakistani says ........................A8 Israel gives mixed signals on peace talks...............................................A9
Economy & Business Volt gets a sticker shock.........................................................................A10 GE agrees to settle with SEC on charges of foreign bribery ...............A11 Fannie, Freddie overhaul moving ahead gingerly...............................A12 Market summary....................................................................................A12
The Fed Page
In the Loop Gift for North Pole: Say it with sewers ...............................................A13
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WEDNESDAY, JULY 28, 2010 War spending in the time of WikiLeaks
hat occurred on the floor of the People’s House on Tuesday afternoon was,
quite possibly, the first ever congressional wikidebate. Lawmakers are privy to all sorts of classified information and confidential briefings about national security, but as they argued about a new spending bill to fund the war in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, they spent a good bit of the afternoon bickering about things they’d seen on the Internet. “The debate to remove us from
CORRECTIONS
In today’s Food section, which was printed in advance, Tom Siet- sema’s First Bite feature on the new restaurant Estadio misspells the first name of the chef. He is Haidar Karoum.
A July 18 Page One article about the number of oil-related incidents in the Gulf of Mexico outpacing the ability of the Min- erals Management Service to in- vestigate them said that the agen- cy, recently renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, re- ceived 12,087 reports of such in- cidents over the past five years. That is the current number of In- cidents of Non-Compliance re- ported to the agency, but not all
·· E-mail
corrections@washpost.com.
were in the gulf; a small percent- age of the incidents occurred in Alaska or elsewhere in the Pacific Ocean. The number includes relatively minor matters such as inspection violations; as the arti- cle reported, the number of in- cidents involving deaths, inju- ries, fires and blowouts was much lower. According to a data- base on the agency’s Web site, the number of serious incidents in the gulf totals 650 to 850 a year. The article also incorrectly de- scribed Frank Patton as the lead investigator of a 2009 investiga- tion into gas rising dangerously in one well and an averted rig ex- plosion. Patton was one of four members of an investigative team.
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Pakistan becomes urgent in light of the WikiLeaks expose,” Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) said of the posting of tens of thousands of classified U.S. military documents on a Web site this week. “I argue that the revelation of this WikiLeaks, you know, thousands and thousands of documents, is evidence that we need to work to continue to build [Pakistan’s] democratic institutions,” Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.) countered. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) argued that “the documents that were published all over the world yesterday remind us that we don’t have any reliable partners; the Afghan government is corrupt and incompetent.” Rep. Howard Berman
(D-Calif.) reasoned that the WikiLeaks treasure trove of documents “isn’t a reason to abandon our many friends in Pakistan.” It was one of those unnerving moments when you realize that our leaders don’t have any better handle on events than the rest of us. Members of Congress send
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troops to war and spend trillions of dollars of the taxpayers’ (and the Chinese government’s) money — and yet they seemed to base their positions on the Afghanistan war on what they’d read in the newspapers, watched on television or picked up from the Web. Seven years after authorizing an invasion of Iraq in search of phantom weapons of mass destruction, lawmakers are basing policy on the drip, drip, drip of WikiLeaks? As lawmakers engaged in this wikidebate, the only solid conclusion to emerge was that President Obama had lost whatever limited control he had over congressional Democrats. In a rare spectacle, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, David Obey (D-Wis.), announced that he was opposing the war spending bill that he was expected to shepherd to passage on the House floor. “I have the obligation to bring this supplemental before the House to allow the institution to work its will,” Obey said on the floor, “but I also have the obligation to my conscience.” Obey, like other liberals, was also angered that the White House had issued a veto threat that forced him to remove from the bill funds for education and
The trying times of ’02 could repeat for Rangel House ethics trial
Traficant’s ‘last hurrah’ by Carol D. Leonnig
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The last time a congressman was put on trial before his con- gressional peers, he showed up late for his hearing, accused in- vestigators of faking evidence and cracked lame jokes to break the tension. In a three-day hearing in July 2002, a panel of lawmakers grilled Rep. Jim Traficant, a vituperative Ohio Democrat accused of an ar- ray of egregious ethics violations. Ultimately, his colleagues agreed that Traficant had broken House rules and he was ejected from the Capitol. Their decision may have been helped by the fact that a fed- eral court had already convicted Traficant of taking bribes, filing false tax returns, and forcing his Hill aides to perform chores at his farm in Ohio and on his D.C. houseboat. Now, eight years later, Rep.
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Charles B. Rangel is facing the likelihood of the same kind of trial before the House ethics com- mittee in September. Once again, an ornate congressional hearing room will be converted into a courtroom, and a member of Con- gress will become a defendant to be judged by his peers. On Thursday, the ethics com-
mittee is expected to hold a meet- ing to outline the charges its in- vestigative panel made against
would be first since
other domestic projects. The defection by Obey and 101 other liberals forced Democratic leaders to rely on support from Republicans for the war spending bill. The liberals, seething because
they were outmaneuvered by Obama, authored a resolution to force an end to U.S. involvement in Pakistan. Thus began the great deluge of wiki references. “Yesterday’s revelations in documents published by WikiLeaks,” said McGovern, show that “the Pakistan intelligence agency exerts great sway” over militant groups hostile to the United States. That, he said, argued for getting out of Pakistan. “I share a high level of
frustration,” Dreier responded, “with the reports that just came out this past weekend, the WikiLeaks report.” But, he said, “these documents have underscored the importance . . . to make sure we build up greater civilian control” in Pakistan. “The most alarming of the
reports relating to WikiLeaks,” Kucinich contributed, were “the ones that described the collusion between Pakistan’s military service and the Taliban.” Dreier sought to argue that “the leak that came out” about
the Taliban connection “is not a completely new revelation.” Unmoved, McGovern said that “in light of all the questions that have been raised” by WikiLeaks, “it seems to me that it is inappropriate for us to vote yes on a blank check for this administration to do whatever they want in Afghanistan.” Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
(Fla.), the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, worried aloud that “some will focus on the information reportedly contained in the many thousands of classified U.S. documents . . . as justification for this resolution.” She said that would be a “knee-jerk approach to our national security.” But the knee-jerk accusation
didn’t cause Kucinich to buckle. In his closing argument, he invoked WikiLeaks three more times as justification for pulling out of Pakistan. Conducting national affairs by wiki is inherently tricky. But if members of the House are getting their intelligence briefings from the Internet, surely the erudite and informed statesmen of the Senate know better — don’t they? As House members attempted to out-wiki one another, the Senate Armed Services Committee was meeting on the other side of the Capitol to question the incoming commander of Central Command, Gen. James Mattis. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the ranking Republican, got right down to business. “General, thank you again for your service,” he began. “On the issue du jour of the WikiLeaks . . .”
danamilbank@washpost.com
Fire and man-made rain
the New York Democrat. It has been scrutinizing Rangel for al- legedly failing to disclose hun- dreds of thousands of dollars in fi- nancial assets, mishandling taxes on a Caribbean villa, misusing several rent-controlled apart- ments in Harlem and doing a leg- islative favor for someone who gave $1 million to a private center named for Rangel at the City Col- lege of New York. Rangel has acknowledged mis-
takes on his financial disclosure forms and mishandling his taxes, and he privately agreed to apolo- gize in public for some House rules violations. But he has ob- jected to suggestions that he im- properly used his public office or helped donors who raised money for the college building. Unless the 80-year-old con- gressman acknowledges some wrongdoing to settle the case, the September trial — which is public and is expected to be televised — will proceed. The forum will mimic a court- room trial. Rangel and his attor- neys will be allowed 30 minutes for an opening statement to rebut the claims. Both sides can then call any witnesses they want. Rarely one to let someone else do the talking for him, Rangel may testify on his own behalf. Rangel’s judges will be four members of the ethics committee —two Democrats and two Repub- licans — who are tasked with de- ciding his guilt or innocence. His accusers will be four other com- mittee members. Staff lawyers will present the evidence gath- ered in the investigation.
CASEY CHRISTIE/BAKERSFIELD CALIFORNIAN VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Once all the evidence is heard, the panel will vote on each charge and, if Rangel is found to be in vi- olation, prepare for another hear- ing to recommend a punishment. That could be a reprimand, a cen- sure or possibly expulsion. It would then take a two-thirds vote of the entire House to approve or reject the punishment. In recent statements, Rangel vowed to fight and said he looked forward to rebutting the allega- tions. “I’m in the kitchen, and I’m not walking out,” he said at a news conference Friday. In July 2002, the defiant ego of
a different congressman was in full view. An often profane show- man who was known for wearing the world’s worst toupee, Traf- icant routinely ended his explo- sive, stem-winding floor speeches by quoting the “Star Trek” line “Beam me up!” He had warned his colleagues and political support- ers before his ethics trial that he expected to be expelled and con- sidered the public hearing his “last hurrah.” He did not disappoint. Asked
why he was late for his own trial one day, Traficant said, “I was on other media broadcasts trying to demean you and everybody else.” There has been flurry of specu-
lation that Rangel is trying settle the case and avoid a trial. Talks between Rangel and the commit- tee broke down last week after the congressman refused to admit to some of the charges. Rep. Zoe Lof- gren (D-Calif.), chairman of the ethics committee and of the sub- committee that would conduct the trial, denied rumors Tuesday that she had met with Rangel. In
an interview, she said that her only contact with Rangel was on the House floor Thursday, when she handed him a letter inform- ing him of the pending trial. Lofgren would not comment on
reported talks between the com- mittee’s and Rangel’s attorneys, but she said that in the past, it has been the practice for the commit- tee’s nonpartisan lawyers to have discussions with the accused law- maker’s counsel. If both sides’ lawyers do reach a deal, the ethics committee is al- most certain to accept it. “We’ve never rejected the nonpartisan recommendation, as a committee, for a settlement. Because, I think, the nonpartisan staff . . . are total- ly familiar [with the case], they sat through every deposition, they’ve looked at all the docu- ments and evidence,” said Lof- gren, who was also one of the eth- ics committee members on the in- vestigative subcommittee in Traficant’s trial. She added that that any plea would include a re- port outlining the violations Ran- gel agreed to accept. It is unusual for Congress to re- move one of its own. Traficant was one of just two members tossed out since the Civil War. The other was Michael “Ozzie” Myers of Pennsylvania, who had been con- victed in 1980 in the Abscam scandal, for taking money from an undercover FBI agent imper- sonating an Arab sheik. Myers compared the experience of being expelled to “the electric chair.”
leonnigc@washpost.com
Staff writer Paul Kane contributed to this report.
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