Feinstein's Iraq Conflict of Interest

by Jason Smith :: January 25, 2007 10:25 PM

Looks like Nancy Pelosi’s swamp has a clog in the drain.

From the party that brought you Alcee “Impeached Judge” Hastings and William “Dollars in the Freezer” Jefferson, now comes Diane Feinstein who’s been turning a nice profit using her position in Congress to appropriate money for her husband.

In the November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.

As chairperson and ranking member of the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee (MILCON) from 2001 through the end of 2005, Feinstein supervised the appropriation of billions of dollars a year for specific military construction projects. Two defense contractors whose interests were largely controlled by her husband, financier Richard C. Blum, benefited from decisions made by Feinstein as leader of this powerful subcommittee.

How convenient. I suspect the same “journalists” that keep harping on the non-existent conflict of interest with Dick Cheney will be quite silent on this clear conflict of interest.

Must be nice to have control over hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars that you can redirect at will to your spouse’s business ventures and investments…

Each year, MILCON’s members decide which military construction projects will be funded from a roster proposed by the Department of Defense. Contracts to build these specific projects are subsequently awarded to such major defense contractors as Halliburton, Fluor, Parsons, Louis Berger, URS Corporation and Perini Corporation. From 1997 through the end of 2005, with Feinstein’s knowledge, Blum was a majority owner of both URS Corp. and Perini Corp.

While setting MILCON agendas for many years, Feinstein, 73, supervised her own staff of military construction experts as they carefully examined the details of each proposal. She lobbied Pentagon officials in public hearings to support defense projects that she favored, some of which already were or subsequently became URS or Perini contracts. From 2001 to 2005, URS earned $792 million from military construction and environmental cleanup projects approved by MILCON; Perini earned $759 million from such MILCON projects.

In her annual Public Financial Disclosure Reports, Feinstein records a sizeable family income from large investments in Perini, which is based in Framingham, Mass., and in URS, headquartered in San Francisco. But she has not publicly acknowledged the conflict of interest between her job as a congressional appropriator and her husband’s longtime control of Perini and URS–and that omission has called her ethical standards into question, say the experts.

…and that’s not even half of the corrupt story. Read the whole article and see that it gets worse… much worse.

Yoo hoo, Madame Speaker… I think there’s a clog in your drain. Got drano?

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