Two Nevada Republicans Call for Ensign to Bow Out.

Yep, things must be getting really bad on the Ensign front.

April 8, 2010

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — Senator John Ensign’s political troubles worsened Thursday as more Republican colleagues from his home state of Nevada said that the ethics investigations surrounding him have threatened to damage the party statewide.

Two Republican leaders in Las Vegas called Thursday for Mr. Ensign to resign, a day after Representative Dean Heller, a Republican from northern Nevada, said that the ethics inquiries were causing “real problems” for party members around the state.

Their comments came on the heels of a front-page article Monday in The Las Vegas Sun that read much like a political obituary. It said Nevada Republicans were upset “that Ensign seems oblivious to the collateral damage caused by his actions, and unwilling to make the matter disappear by resigning.”

Mr. Ensign was considered a rising Republican star and a possible presidential contender in 2012 until he admitted publicly last year to an affair with an aide’s wife.

Mr. Ensign’s office said Thursday that he was traveling in South Asia with a bipartisan Congressional delegation and that the office had no immediate comment on the concerns voiced by Nevada Republicans.

Both the Justice Department and the Senate ethics committee are investigating allegations first raised in The New York Times last October that Mr. Ensign got lobbying work for the aide, Douglas Hampton, and intervened on behalf of his clients in an effort to contain the damage from his affair with Mr. Hampton’s wife.

The senator’s efforts to help Mr. Hampton could be seen as a violation of a one-year moratorium on senior Congressional staffers lobbying their former employers, legal analysts say. The Justice Department is also examining a $96,000 payment that Mr. Ensign’s parents made to the Hamptons.

As new allegations of potential improper lobbying have surfaced in recent weeks against Mr. Ensign, Republican colleagues in Washington and Nevada have remained largely silent, and associates say Mr. Ensign has found himself more isolated politically.

A number of onetime allies in Nevada, including some who received grand jury subpoenas for documents about their dealings with Mr. Ensign, have also said that they felt used by the senator after he turned to them for help in finding lobbying work for Mr. Hampton without disclosing the affair.

In a column posted Thursday on a political Web site, Nevada News and Views, Richard Scotti, former chairman of the Clark County Republican Party, and Swadeep Nigam, former treasurer, said it was time for Mr. Ensign to resign.

“Nobody is coming to his rescue,” they wrote. “Only a small handful of Republican candidates have even sought his endorsement.”

They said the negative publicity had already damaged Republican fund-raising efforts in Nevada and threatened to drag down Republican candidates in the November election. In appearances on Las Vegas news shows on Wednesday, Mr. Heller, the Republican congressman who has been seen as a potential successor to Mr. Ensign, stopped short of calling for the senator’s resignation but said that Mr. Ensign’s “situation” had hurt “the ticket up and down” the state.

He called on Mr. Ensign to publicly answer the ethics questions.

“Let’s get this behind us,” Mr. Heller said in one television appearance. “Let’s move forward. It’s not good for him, it’s not good for me, it’s not good for the Republican Party, it’s not good for the state of Nevada.”

The office of the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, asked Thursday about Mr. Ensign’s political future in light of the criticism, had no immediate comment.

Let The Sun Shine In......

Investigation Shows Ensign Appealed to Company

By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON — Senator John Ensign sought financial backing for a troubled Nevada energy company in 2008, and at the same time he urged the company to hire his mistress’s husband, according to people involved in the matter.

At the request of the company, P2SA Equity, Mr. Ensign had two senior aides contact one of the nation’s largest oil pipeline businesses, Kinder Morgan, about forming a partnership, two executives associated with the project said.

Mr. Ensign’s dealings with P2SA are at the center of a federal criminal inquiry into his efforts to line up lobbying work for Doug Hampton, a former top aide whose wife had an affair with the senator.

Investigators appear to be looking into whether Mr. Ensign sought to ingratiate himself with P2SA so that he could ease Mr. Hampton out of his office in Washington. Former Capitol Hill staff members like Mr. Hampton are barred from lobbying for a year after leaving their jobs, and if Mr. Ensign knowingly helped him evade that restriction, he could face ethics or criminal charges.

While some of Mr. Ensign’s interactions with P2SA were first reported last month, the extent of them was not clear. The senator’s office said then that he had not provided any assistance to the company. But subsequent interviews showed that his most senior Senate aides intervened in an effort to prevent the Las Vegas business from going under, a fact that Mr. Ensign no longer disputes.

“Senator Ensign acted appropriately by contacting the company,” Mr. Ensign’s office said in a statement this week. The office explained its earlier denial that the senator had helped the company by saying that it had meant he had not intervened in Washington to help the firm.
P2SA was one of a half-dozen companies that Mr. Ensign appealed to on Mr. Hampton’s behalf, The New York Times has reported. While the former aide never got work with P2SA, the interaction of Mr. Ensign and his staff with the company appears unusual, interviews with executives at the firm and a review of their e-mail messages showed.

Mr. Ensign asked about hiring Mr. Hampton in May 2008, during a breakfast meeting in Las Vegas with top executives at P2SA, and a related company, BioDiesel of Las Vegas. At the meeting, Mr. Ensign also asked the executives whether they would attend a campaign fund-raising event, recalled Bob Andrews, one of the executives.

The executives had their own request: they needed money to complete construction of a Las Vegas processing plant that would convert used cooking oil from casino hotels into vehicle fuel. The company officials asked the senator to reach out to executives at Kinder Morgan, which already had a large operation in Las Vegas, about a partnership, executives associated with the project said.

Two senior Ensign aides — John Lopez, then his chief of staff, and Brooke Allmon, then his director of Nevada legislative affairs — followed up by calling Kinder Morgan executives, according to participants in the calls. Larry S. Pierce, a spokesman for Kinder Morgan, confirmed that a representative from Mr. Ensign’s office called the company.

“Is there anything that Kinder Morgan can do to foster a better relationship with BioDiesel of Las Vegas?” one Kinder Morgan executive, who would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the investigation, recalled being asked. Negotiations between the companies — which previously had informal talks about an alliance — intensified after Mr. Ensign’s staff intervened, a Kinder Morgan executive said.

Meanwhile, Greg Paulk, a top executive at P2SA and at BioDiesel, contributed $10,000 to the Senate Majority Fund, a political action committee Mr. Ensign is affiliated with, records showed.

Mr. Hampton, who was meeting with BioDiesel executives in the summer of 2008, boasted that if they hired him, he could provide unparalleled access to Mr. Ensign, a company official said. “I am the one person who when I call, John Ensign will answer,” Mr. Hampton told the official.

Ms. Allmon, the Ensign aide, also pressed the company to hire Mr. Hampton, the official said. “If you want John Ensign to work with you, you have got to hire Doug Hampton,” the executive recalled her saying in a meeting in Las Vegas.

A lawyer for Ms. Allmon said in a statement that she had never “made any direct or implied statement that any person, company or entity was required to hire Doug Hampton,” but that she had acknowledged meeting with BioDiesel officials. Neither she nor Mr. Lopez now works for Mr. Ensign.

Kinder Morgan decided not to form a partnership with P2SA or BioDiesel of Las Vegas, after concluding it did not make financial sense, Mr. Pierce said. Mr. Hampton was not given a lobbying contract by the company.

Federal officials are also examining Mr. Ensign’s dealings with several small debit card companies in his role as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2008. Subpoenas have been sent to current and former executives at three Las Vegas payment-processing and software companies, whom Mr. Ensign had asked to consider becoming “Majority Makers” by donating at least $28,500.

Derek LaFavor, then chief executive of a Las Vegas firm, Selling Source, said that Mr. Ensign had urged him to join the “Majority Makers” club at a meeting early that year. (He declined.) He said that federal investigators had asked him whether Mr. Ensign had mentioned Mr. Hampton or solicited work for him; he said that the senator had not.

James D. Hammer, president of PaycardUSA, another Las Vegas company, helped organize the meeting with Mr. Ensign and made a $28,500 donation. He did not respond to repeated requests for comment. KLAS-TV, the CBS affiliate in Las Vegas, has reported that PayCard, and a third company, eCommLink, have also received subpoenas.
 
Mr. Hampton, in an interview last month, said that with Mr. Ensign’s assistance, he met with eCommLink executives to discuss serving as a lobbyist for them, offering to use contacts in Mr. Ensign’s office to pursue business for the company with the Treasury Department.

Officials at the National Republican Senatorial Committee in Washington — which Mr. Ensign no longer leads — have separately confirmed that they have received a subpoena for documents. Officials there and in Mr. Ensign’s office would not comment when asked what investigators had questioned them about.

Eric Lichtblau contributed reporting.

Let The Sun Shine In......

Why do Gopers keep getting away with corrunption?

Vegas firm factors in Ensign inquiry By: John Bresnahan and Manu Raju March 26, 2010 05:04 AM EDT

R&R Partners is famous for creating the Las Vegas slogan “What happens here stays here.” But it’s the firm’s Washington connections — and its deep ties to scandal-plagued Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) — that have drawn it into a Senate Ethics Committee investigation and, potentially, a Department of Justice inquiry. A top R&R executive, Pete Ernaut, has been subpoenaed by the Ethics Committee as part of its investigation into Ensign’s extramarital affair with Cindy Hampton, his former campaign treasurer. John Lopez, Ensign’s former chief of staff, who now lobbies for R&R, has been subpoenaed by the Ethics Committee as well. The $40 million-per-year company is a power player on the political scene, with connections to virtually every major politician in Nevada. CEO Billy Vassiliadis — or Billy V., as he’s known in Nevada — has close relationships with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and his son, gubernatorial candidate Rory Reid, and was a senior adviser to Barack Obama’s Nevada campaign in 2008. But it’s the Ensign connections that are bringing unwelcome scrutiny. The Ethics Committee and the Justice Department are conducting parallel probes into the senator’s efforts to steer lobbying work to Doug Hampton, a former top Ensign aide married to Cindy Hampton, after both Hamptons left Ensign’s office in April 2008. The Department of Justice is also reportedly reviewing allegations that Ensign offered to help Nevada credit card companies derail pending legislation in return for donations to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which he chaired in 2007-08. Ernaut, a former state assemblyman who served as campaign manager for Ensign’s 2000 and 2006 Senate races, said R&R received a subpoena from the Ethics Committee late last month, demanding that it turn over a “broad brush” of documents to the panel by March 31. R&R has represented NV Energy, Nevada’s biggest utility company, on the federal level since May 2008, although there are much longer ties at the state level. Doug Hampton also lobbied for NV Energy while working for November Inc., a company run by two top political operatives for Ensign, Mike and Lindsey Slanker. Hampton never formally registered as a lobbyist. Ernaut has also worked closely with the Slankers on Nevada political campaigns, according to a source tied to the firm. R&R has not yet been contacted by the Justice Department, Ernaut said last week. Ernaut said that while R&R is “disappointed in the entire situation,” it has acted ethically and is cooperating fully with Senate investigators. Federal investigators and the Senate Ethics Committee are likely to focus their attention heavily on Lopez, whom Ensign reportedly asked to serve as a middleman between the senator and Doug Hampton. Lopez, like Ensign, has denied any wrongdoing in his dealings with Hampton. Lopez’s lawyer, Robert Kelner, declined to say whether Lopez had been subpoenaed by the DoJ, though FBI agents sought to interview the ex-Ensign aide back in January. R&R also discussed working with Allegiant Air — another Las Vegas company that Doug Hampton unofficially lobbied for while working for November Inc. — to represent its interests in Washington, according to sources familiar with the talks. R&R has not registered Allegiant as a federal lobbying client at this time. Maurice Gallagher, Allegiant’s CEO, has been a major financial backer of Ensign’s. “Certainly, when you have a company in the public eye, these types of things are always possible,” Ernaut said of R&R’s connection to the Ensign investigation. Ernaut’s background is typical of the background of the high-profile political players who run R&R. Whichever Nevada candidate or party wins office, he or she typically has close ties to R&R even before being sworn in. “It doesn’t matter who holds office in Nevada, R&R is always on the winning side,” said a source familiar with the firm’s operations. This source added: “There is no conflict of interest when you already control everything.” Ernaut is a “prominent political player in the state,” said Jon Ralston, a well-regarded political commentator in Las Vegas. Ralston called R&R “powerful,” noting its ties to many companies and politicians throughout the Silver State. Ernaut attended the University of Nevada at Reno with Brian Sandoval, the former state attorney general and federal judge now seeking the governor’s mansion, and Sandoval’s wife. Ernaut later served in the state Assembly with Sandoval, and now he’s a top adviser for Sandoval’s campaign for the GOP gubernatorial nomination. In 1984, Ernaut transferred to the University of Southern California, where he was a fraternity brother of Nevada GOP Rep. Dean Heller, who may run for Ensign’s seat in 2012. Ernaut, who was a campaign manager and chief of staff to former Nevada GOP Gov. Kenny Guinn, first met Ensign during his successful run for a House seat in 1994. Ernaut managed Ensign’s 2000 and 2006 Senate campaigns. Before the sex scandal broke last summer, Ernaut remained close to Ensign; the two attended social events together and played golf when the senator was back home in Nevada. Ernaut said he met Doug Hampton, a longtime Ensign friend, some five years ago, when Hampton moved to Las Vegas. Doug and Cindy Hampton went to work for Ensign in late 2006 — Cindy as campaign treasurer and Doug as deputy chief of staff, with Lopez as his boss. But Ernaut said he had no clue about the senator’s affair until Ensign called him the day before he publicly disclosed it in mid-June, a call that Ernaut said “made me sick to my stomach.” Ernaut said he hasn’t spoken frequently to either Ensign or Doug Hampton since last year, adding that the controversy “certainly strained the relationship.” Ernaut said he has been close to Lopez for some 25 years and that he had tried to woo Lopez to join R&R over the past decade. Lopez left Ensign’s office in late July. Even though Ernaut is receiving more scrutiny because of his ties to Ensign, Vassiliadis has also been questioned in the Ensign case. Vassiliadis’s ties to Washington run as deep as Ernaut’s. Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) was Vassiliadis’s political science professor when he attended the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. “It’s a small state. I have to tell you, if there was an issue that had to [do] with tourism, gaming, travel — although Billy is much more knowledgeable than just on those issues — I wouldn’t hesitate a minute to pick up the phone and ask him what he thought,” said Rep. Shelley Berkley, the Las Vegas-area Democratic congresswoman, who has known Vassiliadis for some 30 years. Vassiliadis, even though he’s a Democrat, aided Ensign during his 2000 Senate campaign, just two years after Ensign and Reid were engaged in a bitter contest that Reid won by only 428 votes. He has also donated to Republican candidates and incumbents. He said his firm will continue to have deep connections to Nevada politics. In a recent interview, Vassiliadis said that R&R “encourage[s] our people to get involved in politics. It’s part of who we are.”

© 2010 Capitol News Company, LLC

Let The Sun Shine In......

The C-Street Family: Sexual Affairs and the Chosen

Just when you think you have heard it all, along comes this gang of "chosen" idiots! This should be enough to scare the hell out of decent, patriotic American who are believers in our constitution. I believe it was JFK who said that there is no place for secret societies in our Democratic Republic. This revelation just proves that point, again.

I read something about this gang of loony tunes several years back. Admittedly I found it hard to believe then, but so much has happened since, it's difficult to not believe anything, no matter how insane it sounds.

Our nation is going to hell in a collection plate!



By Mark Karlin


Kudos to Rachel Maddow for latching on to the captivating and chilling story about not just the lascivious and potentially illegal activities of some of the "C Street" Family, but -- more importantly -- focusing on their belief that they are chosen by God to lead and infiltrate our government.


And she hasn't stopped pursuing this startling story, defying the normal news cycle of a nano-second of coverage unless it's Michael Jackson's death or a blonde white girl disappearing in Aruba.


What gets lost in the disgusting details of Ensign's adulterous affair, Mark Sanford's (an associate member of the Family) lust for an Argentine, and former Congressman Chip Pickering's adulterous bonking on-site at the C Street "Christian fellowship house" is something that Maddow has repeatedly come back to: these men don't believe they are responsible to moral or governmental laws. If they deviate from the "righteous path," God is only testing their strength, because they are the ones divinely chosen to lead -- and it is weakness to succumb to remorse about one's "misbehavior." That is why Mark Sanford said he won't resign and compared himself to King David, who slept adulterously with Bathsheba and then had her husband killed.


The low-key author, Jeff Sharlet, of "The Family:The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power" is a credible chronicler of this cabal that is like a dagger in democracy. He writes:

Family leaders consider their political network to be Christ's avant garde, an elite that transcends not just conventional morality but also earthly laws regulating lobbying. In the Family's early days, they debated registering as "a lobby for God's Kingdom." Instead, founder Abraham Vereide decided that the group could be more effective by working personally with politicians. "The more invisible you can make your organization," Vereide's successor, current leader Doug Coe preaches, "the more influence you can have." That's true -- which is why we have laws requiring lobbyists to identify themselves as such.

But David Coe, Doug Coe's son and heir apparent, calls himself simply a friend to men such as John Ensign, whom he guided through the coverup of his affair. I met the younger Coe when I lived for several weeks as a member of the Family. He's a surprising source of counsel, spiritual or otherwise. Attempting to explain what it means to be chosen for leadership like King David was -- or Mark Sanford, according to his own estimate -- he asked a young man who'd put himself, body and soul, under the Family's authority, "Let's say I hear you raped three little girls. What would I think of you?" The man guessed that Coe would probably think that he was a monster. "No," answered Coe, "I wouldn't." Why? Because, as a member of the Family, he's among what Family leaders refer to as the "new chosen." If you're chosen, the normal rules don't apply.

Yes, you read that right, the son of Doug Coe, the "spiritual leader" of the Family and his heir apparent, would consider a Family member raping a child a test of the member's closeness and to be resolved inside of the fellowship, without reporting it to the law authorities, it appears.

This is how dangerous they are. They apparently believe even child rape is something that God wants them to keep secret amongst themselves!


And the heroes held up for the Family are the likes of great tyrants as Sharlet writes:

If the Family men who stood over John Ensign as he wrote a baldly insincere breakup letter to his mistress were naive about hearts that want what they want, they don't claim ignorance about the strongmen with whom they build bonds of prayer and foreign aid. They admire them. Counseling Rep. Tiahrt, Doug Coe offered Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden as men whose commitment to their causes is to be emulated. Preaching on the meaning of Christ's words, he says, "You know Jesus said 'You got to put Him before mother-father-brother sister? Hitler, Lenin, Mao, that's what they taught the kids. Mao even had the kids killing their own mother and father. But it wasn't murder. It was for building the new nation. The new kingdom."

Sen. Ensign, facing calls for an investigation of what may have been felony abuses of campaign funds in his attempt to cover up his affair, might not get there. Then again, the Family's preview of a "new kingdom" -- a private club of men protecting each others' secrets -- doesn't sound so different from the old kingdom. That's the awful secret behind the closed doors of the C Street House, the Family's authoritarian rhetoric, and even the Family's real mission: business as usual, fortified by faith in more power for the powerful and privilege itself a form of piety.

The Family on C Street includes Dr. Tom "Execute Abortionists" Coburn who grilled Sonya Sotomayor during her Judiciary Committee hearings -- and who counseled Ensign on his ongoing adulterous affair with a staffer who is the wife of another staffer.

These are dangerous men to the Republic. They think that they are members of some modern Skull and Bones of Sparta, selected by God to inflict a deranged "Christian" government upon the democracy of America -- and for whom immorality and breaking the law are only acts in which God is testing them -- and for which they hold no public responsibility in their hearts and minds.

Keeping secret one of the members who might admit to child rape!


God help us all -- but not their God, who is merely a monstrous, self-serving excuse in their own minds for evading the laws, ethics, and responsibilities of living a civilized and legal life.

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (July, 2009 Paperback Edition). Available by clicking here from BuzzFlash.com

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Let The Sun Shine In......