Murtha Moved Earmark Between Brothers’ Clients & Hoyer To Be Forced to Disclose PMA Probe

Uh Oh!  Could this be the moment of reckoning for the Democrats?  Jack Murtha and Steny Hoyer may both be in the lime light in the coming days.

The Democrat Culture of Corruption Continues:

First, it was discovered that Murtha moved an earmark over $8 million between his brothers’ clients.  Nepotism and corruption much?  That’s sure to stimulate the economy and doesn’t remind me at all of what dictators did when given money.  No dictator I read about would ever take money and give it to his family members or their businesses to line their pockets rather than provide for the betterment of his/her constituents/sarc.

In early 2005, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) apparently added language to a tsunami relief bill shifting $8.2 million from a former client of his brother’s lobbying firm to a new client of the same firm.

That earmark is now tangled up in a federal indictment alleging that some of the money was skimmed by contractors and a Defense Department employee for their personal use.

Murtha’s spokesman said that no one in his office has any recollection of the transaction, and the House Appropriations Committee was unable to provide any information about how the language appeared in the tsunami relief bill.

Of course they knew nothing about it – seems like this is the norm coming from Washington, D.C. these days – I don’t think they know much of anything, in fact scratch that, they don’t know anything.

But sources familiar with the appropriations process agreed it was impossible that a provision removing earmarks from one company in Murtha’s district and transferring the money to another company in his district could have been added to the bill without Murtha’s involvement, since he was at the time the ranking member on the subcommittee with jurisdiction over the language.

The provision appears in the House committee report of a March 2005 bill providing billions of dollars worth of military spending and aid to the Asian countries that were devastated by the December 2004 tsunami that killed more than 250,000 people.

The bill included a “technical corrections” section, which transferred $8.2 million to “other procurement, Air Force” for a project called the “mobile common data link gateway.” This project — later called the “ground mobile gateway” — was an effort to build a unified battlefield communications platform for the Air Force by a Pennsylvania company called Coherent Systems.

Read roll call for the fully story and timeline of this corruption…

Steny Hoyer (D-MD) is also being pressured into complying with the federal probe into PMA and their long ties with top/senior Democrat officials.  One of which was the aforementioned Murtha who probably has the most ties – I think this may be Murtha’s last stand!

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) plans to offer as early as Wednesday afternoon a privileged resolution to force the ethics committee to disclose whether it is investigating senior Democratic appropriators’ ties to the PMA Group, Democratic sources say.

Hoyer’s move follows eight attempts by Republican anti-earmark crusader Rep. Jeff Flake (Ariz.) to jump-start a probe — and aims to pre-empt Flake’s ninth stab at the issue, which was due for a vote on Thursday. It marks a sharp break from Democratic leaders’ previous approach to the burgeoning controversy involving the now-defunct lobbying firm, which amounted to them trying to keep their ranks in line opposing the Flake resolutions.

In late winter, when Flake began his assault, Hoyer argued in leadership meetings that Democrats should embrace the resolution to neutralize it.

But Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pushed back, contending that such a move would open lawmakers up to ethics witch-hunts down the line. Since then, Democrats have slowly peeled off to support Flake: While only 17 broke ranks on his first attempt, 29 supported his latest, offered just before the Memorial Day recess.

The move comes just after Rep. Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.) acknowledged his offices and some staff had been subpoenaed as part of a federal probe into PMA. Other Democratic appropriators, including Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), have long ties to PMA and its clients.

Hoyer squared off against Murtha in 2006 for the Majority Leader post, beating him by an overwhelming margin.

Jeff Flake has been proposing an ethics panel for a couple of years and has been blocked by the Democrat majority in the House and it’s understandable as to why – they are guilty!  Most of the ethics violations are within the Democrat Party, that’s not to say that some Republicans may be found guilty of some violations, but as of now the culture of corruption lies within the majority party.

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