Menendez spokeswoman: ‘Senator’s actions have been appropriate and lawful’

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CNN: Feds will bring criminal charges against Menendez

Dr. Salomon Melgen, left and Senator Robert Menendez

CNN is reporting that outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder has signed off on prosecutor’s plans to proceed with criminal corruption charges against New Jersey’s senior U.S. Senator, Bob Menendez.

The fact that Menendez has been the most outspoken Democratic opponent of the Obama Administration’s policies regarding Iran and Cuba is just a coincidence.

The Justice Department is said to believe that Menendez improperly pressured Medicare administrators to back off on his friend and benefactor, Dr. Salomon Melgen, a Miami ophthalmologist accused of over billing the heath care program. Additionally, Menendez has been accused of using his position the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to improperly advocate for a Melgen owned security company doing business in the Dominican Republican.

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“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you”

~ Joseph Heller, Catch 22

Last week we learned that the Obama Administrations IRS has been targeting Conservative groups with the words ‘Tea Party’ and ‘Patriot’ in their names.

Today we learned that Obama’s Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors of the Associated Press.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.

In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

What’s next?

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Hiding Behind Executive Privilege

A National Review Online Editorial

President Barack Obama has long tried to distance himself from the “Fast and Furious” scandal at the Justice Department, which stems from a program under which Mexican drug cartels were allowed to acquire U.S. firearms that were later used against U.S. law-enforcement personnel. By invoking executive privilege to stymie congressional investigation of the case, the president has placed himself squarely in the center of it.

President Obama, who had been a bitter critic of the Bush administration’s use of executive privilege, today through his representatives protested that he is only doing what the Bush administration did before him. The same man who once accused President Bush of “hiding behind executive privilege” is now hiding behind George W. Bush.

Executive privilege serves a necessary function in our constitutional order, reinforcing the separation of powers and protecting sensitive deliberations within the executive branch, and it is especially strong when the president or his closest advisers in the White House are involved in the communication. In this case, the administration has long denied that the president was directly involved. Instead, Attorney General Eric Holder wasted everyone’s time invoking a spurious form of deliberative privilege that was completely decoupled from executive privilege. Such a privilege has no force vis-à-vis Congress. By finally invoking executive privilege yesterday, the president belatedly acknowledged that his attorney general was full of it.

Executive privilege has legitimate uses — and illegitimate uses. For instance, it is not intended to be used merely to protect the president from political embarrassment stemming from grievous errors in judgment by members of his cabinet or officers of the departments over which they preside. There is good reason to believe that in this case the privilege is being abused.

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U.S. Justice Department Investigating Standard & Poor’s

The New York Times is reporting that the Justice Department is investigating Standard and Poor’s role in the melt down of the economy due to the AAA ratings the agency bestowed on sub-prime mortgage backed securities. 

Justice wants to know if the rating agency’s analysts wanted to downgrade the mortages only to be overruled by S&P business managers who collected handsome fees for favorable ratings.

The investigation is said to have started before S & P downgraded U.S Treasury Debt.  Of course it did.  However the news of the investigation coming out now is purely polticial retribution on the part of the Obama administrations Justice Department looking to discredit the agency.

Justice should also investigate Fannie, Freddie and Frank.  As in Barney Frank.  But it won’t.

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Christie’s Travel As U.S. Attorney Criticised Again

In a reprise of an issue from last year’s gubernatorial campaign, Governor Chris Christie’s travel expenses while U.S. Attorney have been criticised in a Justice Department Audit.

The audit says Christie over spent by a total of $2,176 over 14 trips.  12 of those trips involved cases that earned the government $311 million in civil penalties.

I wonder how much the audit cost.

The Asbury Park Press has the story.  The APP gives the story much more prominent coverage than they did the ReGen story  that involved Senators Robert Menendex, Frank Lautenberg and Congressmen Frank Pallone and Steve Rothman pressuring the FDA to approve an unsafe medical device in exchange for campaign contributions.

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