I’m looking forward to this being reported all over the mainstream media at any moment.
To summarize, Rosen underreported the money raised for the HRC fundraiser, allowing the campaign to take in more “hard money” for the 2000 fight against Rick Lazio. What is amusing about this is that Rosen was apparently done in by Ray Reggie, Ted Kennedy’s brother in law. Apparently, Reggie has spent the past three years working undercover for the FBI.
I have two questions.
(1) Will this hurt Hillary Clinton?
(2) Will the mainstream media report the story at all, let alone with the zest that they are currently pursuing Tom Delay and John Bolton? This guy is facing four felonies in connection with illegal fundraising activities for HRC. If the story is ignored, that should put to rest the fiction that there is no leftward bias in the national media.
First of all, that story is almost 4 months old, so I’d imagine it was already reported on. Because it’s so old, it’s difficult to do searches on news websites
And here’s an article from the New York Post from last month related to the Rosen indictment (it talks about Peter Paul, who threw the party that Rosen was involved in, and who just pled guilty to fraud a month ago in an unrelated case)
Nope. Is the story boring, or does it have legs? It took years before the Abramoff stuff started hitting the mainstream. Does that put to rest the fiction that there’s no rightward bias to the national media? Of course it doesn’t. If people start talking about a little bitty two column-inch story around the water cooler, there’ll soon be an eight column-inch story on the subject. If everyone passes the story by because it’s about as interesting as the republican’s perennial underfunding of Nunn-Lugar it’ll languish on the back pages until someone gets a jail sentence; and then there’ll be another two column inch story on page two, and maybe people will talk about it around the water cooler.
It shouldn’t hurt her unless (1) Rosen is guilty and (2) she had actual knowledge of his actions. It won’t hurt her unless this story gets a lot more attention than it has to date (see Squink’s post above).
On point number one, I don’t think the feds would indict someone that close to Hillary unless they were damned sure it would stick.
On point number two, it stretches the imagination that she was not aware of his actions. However, a straightfaced lie that can’t be proven otherwise will take care of that.
I doubt we’ll even know whether this will hurt Clinton until the Pubs nominate a challenger for her Senate seat next year, and he/she has to decide whether this is an issue that will gain any traction with the voters if they try to make use of it.
If it was Mrs. Clinton herself who was doing the under-reporting, instead of some flunky beneath her, the media would be on it like a pack of starving rottweillers on a pork chop.
As it is, I gotta go with Squink here; nobody (except for the mouth-foaming anti-Clinton-anything nutjobs) cares about this story because it’s boring. How many people even knew who Rosen was before he got indicted?
It’s not boring to me. HC has a reputation of being an extreme micromanager; if Rosen broke the law she knew about it ahead of time. Watergate started with the bust of some noncelebrity burglars.
Of course if Rosen left her campaign and got involved in some sort of crime at this level no one would care.
One thing that I have been wondering about is the reason behind Ray Reggies time as an FBI operative. What did they have on him to force him to cooperate? Or did he decide that he needed to do it as an act of conscience?
From what I understand, he worked undercover for three years. I’m wondering if any more shoes are going to drop.
Really? If I were cooking the books for my boss I doubt I’d tell them, plausible deniability and all that. And I doubt Hillary would’ve had time to go over all her campaigns financial ledgers with a fine-tooth comb at the same time she was running for office/leaving the white house etc. After all, that’s the point of hiring people like Rosen.
She could have known of course, but I wouldn’t call it a streach of the imagination that she didn’t.
That’s a bit of a streach. Again, she may have known, but it certainly doesn’t follow as straight forwardly as you imply here.
“Irregularities” in campaign fundraising are pretty common, and unless HRC is specifically named in the indictment, I don’t see how this can be anything but a flea on the ass of an elephant. Or donkey, if you prefer a more politically accurate description.
This is why Sen. Ted Kennedy has kept his second wife (Virginia( out of the public eye! It also exoplains why Ted is trying to keep his ex-wife from selling their former home in Hyannisport-he needs to lay low, lest his embarrassing brother -in -law adds some tarnish to the already-tarnished Kennedy nameplate.
Considering that there’s virtually no mainstream media attention being given to Rosen and virtually none to Delay and Bolton, I would say that the answer to that question is yes. I just checked the politics pages for CNN, Faux News, and MSNBC. I got one little article on Bolton, and none on Delay or Rosen.
Funny thing. In the recent thread about right-wing promotion of terrorism, we saw quotes from Republican aides and campaign staff promoting murder, torture, and violence. Our local right-wingers immediately responded that what aides and staff say and do doesn’t matter at all; all that matters is what the actual members of Congress say and do. Yet here w’ere suddenly supposed to care about something a fundraiser did. As usual, it’s one set of standards for conservatives and a different set for liberals, eh?
So this is a perfect opportunity to prove that it doesn’t go both ways. I am a liberal and swing way to the Democrats. I personally want to figure out what the hell is going on here and remove all responsible from the support of the party.
It doesn’t matter if Republicans do it many times worse. They can point to incidents like this and say, “The other side does it too,” and that is enough for most people. I believe in being much harsher on people who agree with you than those who do not. People who agree with you politically and cook the books or circumvent the law in other ways reflect poorly on your entire political philosophy/party/side. I expect this sort of behavior from political opponents, not from people I support.
