If you like a nice cup of irony with your schadenfreude pie, here’s a story for you:
Leland Yee, the California legislator behind the anti-violent video game law that was eventually struck down in Brown vs. EMA*, has been arrested on charges of bribery and conspiracy to traffic firearms. Yee is accused of accepting bribes in exchange for official actions and of attempting to broker a deal between an arms-trafficking acquaintance and a businessman who happened to be an undercover FBI agent.
The FBI affidavit has been unsealed and is now available. (PDF warning–it’s a PDF of a scanned 137-page document.) The weapons-deal part seems to start on page 82, but there’s plenty of other juicy bits–it’s rife with drug deals, money laundering, gang connections, and conspiracy.
So, how is Mr. Yee going to blame all this on video games?
*If you’re still anemic, he has also been a gun control proponent, but this is the Game Room, and that discussion would be better held elsewhere.
To be fair, I have the impression that he was willing to traffic in just about any kind of illegal contraband; the fact that this was about guns is just coincidental.
The third California Democratic State Senator to be arrested since the beginning of the year. The President pro tem of the Senate is grinding his teeth and trying to force them to resign their seats to they can get more Democrats into the Senate, which right now no longer has a filibuster-proof Democratic majority.
I’m upset about this, Yee is a major name in California politics, he ran for Mayor of San Francisco and was planning on a run for State Secretary of State this year. The corruption charges have to do with his fundraising for campaigns.
I thought that was the most hilarious part of the story. Democrats finally get their 2/3rds majority but can’t keep it because their officeholders keep getting arrested.
