Whistleblowin’ Nan

by Joel on January 25, 2012

By Joel Thurtell

Why is House minority Leader Nancy Pelosi choosing this time to blow the ethics whistle on Newt Gingrich?

That’s a no-brainer.

It’s election year, and Newt looks like a potent candidate to challenge President Obama.

So the Nance figures, Why not use her special knowledge about Newt’s old ethics transgressions to tarnish him now that he’s won the South Carolina primary and is a serious candidate?

What does it matter that Newt is no longer in Congress and thus is untouchable by the House Ethics Committee?

What if some of his transgressions went beyond the realm of ethics, stepping into the area of criminal violations?

We might ask ourselves in that case why Nancy held her fire back in the day.

But as long as the congresswoman is waxing eloquent on ethics, what about members of her own Democratic party who got a free ride away from Ethics scrutiny?

Who might I be thinking of?

Why, none other than Detroit’s own U.S. Rep. John “The Con” Conyers.

Actually, it’s his wife, Monica, who is the real con right now, sitting in prison for selling her vote on the Detroit City Council.

Long as Nancy’s blowing smoke Newt’s way, let’s take another look at the behavior of a congressman who got away with it.

Here’s another of my essays about Conyers, first published on October 9, 2010:

By Joel Thurtell

Now the taxpayers of Detroit have to pay $90,000 to say adios to a city worker fired by Monica Conyers because the staffer was about to blab that the Mon was making her do personal chores on the public dime.

Former staffer Yakima Washington said she was getting ready to report Monica Conyers for making her run personal errands as a city employee. That’s when Monica fired her. Washington sued.

It’s an old story with the Conyers duo, turning public servants into private lackeys. At least Yakima Washington got some money out of the deal.

Mostly, those who work for U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Detroit and his wife, Detroit City Council President Monica Conyers, got stuck with working phone banks or changing a diaper.

Demeaning on-the-government-paid-job personal assignments? Par for the course with this duo.

In the case of Congressman Conyers, he assigned federal employees to do everything on government-paid time from babysitting for his two sons as full-time residents of his home or at their own homes, tutoring the Conyers kids in the congressman’s Detroit federal building office, tutoring Monica for her law school classes, chauffeuring the congressman or his kids, and the list goes on and on.

In fall 2003, I even caught a Conyers staffer on the congressman’s payroll while doing campaign work in the Chicago office of presidential aspirant Carol Mosely Braun.

As we wrote in the Detroit Free Press on November 21, 2003, Conyers had federal employees — some of them from the House Judiciary Committee — doing political campaign work on office time, at Conyers’ behest. This didn’t happen once or twice — I made a chart showing how it went on for years, peaking whenever there was an election of interest to Conyers.

None of the staffers dragooned into private service got paid a nickel, let alone ninety grand, to go away.

Instead, on the job with Conyers, they learned to keep their credit cards at home, because when they dined or traveled with Conyers, he had a habit of sticking his workers with the restaurant tab or travel expenses, according to Deanna Maher, his former Downriver office chief of staff.

Maher, now retired, lived for several weeks in the Conyers home on 7 Mile in Detroit, taking care of the two Conyers boys while Monica was away studying law. She cashed her government pay checks all he while.

Sydney Rooks was Conyers’ legal counsel. She also tutored the Conyers kids, too, and helped Monica with her law school studies. That was a waste — Monica has failed the Michigan bar exam four times.

Recalls Maher, “Elise Cathey was hired as congressional staff to take them into her home for the entire summer of 2003 without being reimbursed one dime for their food or clothing.”

Maher wrote to me earlier this week after she read a Detroit Free Press op-ed piece about Monica Conyers’ call for the death penalty for people who murder kids. Monica Conyers said she was “mad as hell” about the murder of a 4-year-old.

It was an amazing statement, Maher told me in an email October 6, 2008: “Today’s DFP editorial re Monica’s latest absolutely blew my mind. Here she is asking for the death penalty of anyone who shoots and kills a child while she herself was brandishing a gun towards her own child, albeit, John III was not an infant and had a butcher knife in his hand and ran out the door to hail down the local police.

Maher said she knew about the police gun and bucher knife incident because she was assigned to keep the story out of the Free Press.

“How dare she even attempt to come across as a decent mother who cares about children when she let her two young boys be placed with anyone her husband could order from his congressional office staff to take care of them. It did not matter to her what their backgrounds were or if her children were safe and nurtured as long as their care did not interfere with her agenda. Her notorious abuse of Congressman Conyers’ staff (not just me) was bad enough. The abuse of her children when dumping them with anyone is by far more egregious.

“While on staff, I stepped in many times to attend to her children’s needs, because simply I felt sorry for them and could not stand by and watch. I remember attending to a severe diaper rash of the youngest child because others could not or did not want to change his diaper. More than once, I personally gave them a place to sleep when neither parent was available.”

Maher called me today (October 8, 2008) to ask if I’d received any feedback from my column, “Pistol packin’ Monica,” about the 2001 cop shop report.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve had plenty of comments on stories I wrote about billionaire Matty Moroun’s takeover of a public park in Detroit. I’ve had comments about my financial column, “How to stop a bank run.”

But there were no responses to “Pistol packin’ Monica.”

Not one.

“Aren’t people outraged?” Maher asked.

“That,” said Maher, “Is outrageous.”

Outraged? Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

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‘What Nancy Pelosi knows’

by Joel on January 24, 2012

By Joel Thurtell

Mitt Romney wants to know ‘what Nancy Pelosi knows’ about ethics violations by Newt Gingirch when he was Speaker of the House.

I’d settle for knowing what Nancy knows about her fellow Democrat, John “The Con” Conyers.

Nancy was quoted in Huffington Post saying she has the goods on Newt:

“One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich,” she said. “I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him, four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. A thousand pages of his stuff.”

Well, she has the goods on Johnny Boy, too.

Seems only fair, if she’s gonna spill the beans on the Newster, then she oughta jam it to the ranking minority member of the House Judiciary COmmittee.

Because the Nance knows the score on John The Con.

Hey, Dems — wanta dig up old dirt on Newt?

Then give us the dirt on Conyers, too!

For the Detroit Free Press articles on Conyers, see my blog category, Conyers Series.

For my blog reporting on Conyers, see JC & Me.

One of these days, maybe House Minority Leader Pelosi will have a conversation about JC. She knows a lot about him. She helped sweep his legal and ethical violations under the congressional carpet.

C’mon, Nance, tell us what you know about John!

Here’s an essay I published August 5, 2008 on the awkwardness of Nancy Pelosi protecting Conyers:

The Ethics “Paralysis’ Charade

By Joel Thurtell

The new Democratic Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has promised us “the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history.”

But Democrats are not serious about that promise now any more than they have been for the last several years. If they really took ethics reform seriously, Democrats would long ago have moved decisively for an investigation of one of their most senior and prominent members.

John Conyers, I believe, is the simple reason why Democrats are pulling their ethics punch. They could have done something about ethics long before now. No new rules or laws are needed to deal with members like Conyers. Even as the minority party, Democrats had parity with Republicans on only one committee in all Congress. That’s on the so-called Ethics Committee, officially the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. Yet Democrats allowed Republicans for the past two years to paralyze the Ethics Committee.

Or so it would seem.

All along, there has been Democratic complicity in the committee’s lethargy. An article in The Nation on Feb. 6, 2006 suggested that Democrats are reluctant to file complaints against Republican members for fear of reprisal complaints aimed at Democrats. Hence a “truce” that in effect has stymied, the magazine argued, the committee from investigating new cases. In fact, there may be far more complicity on the part of Democrats than commentators acknowledge.

More than two years ago, on Nov. 21, 2003, the Detroit Free Press published a pair of articles exposing longstanding abuses by U.S. Rep. John Conyers of Detroit. The Free Press stories revealed that Conyers had routinely assigned not one, not two, not three, but ALL of his congressional staffers to do campaign work on government-paid time. The work was done not only for Conyers’ own re-election campaigns, but for others, including his wife and various local, state and national Democratic candidates whose elections Conyers thought crucial. I’m one of the reporters who worked on these stories. At one point in November 2003 I reached a Conyers staffer by telephone where he sat working in the Chicago presidential campaign office of Carol Moseley Braun. He was being paid to be in Detroit, organizing a universal health insurance symposium for constituents, except that Conyers had assigned him to work for Braun. The staffer was collecting pay for congressional work others were obliged to do for him, I confirmed through congressional payroll records. Not only office time was squandered, but office phones, fax machines, photo copiers and computers were used for political campaigns, notwithstanding that misuse is contrary to House ethics guidelines and in some cases illegal.

Soon after our articles were published, I was told the Ethics Committee had opened an investigation into the abuses we outlined regarding Conyers. I reported that. But the committee has not acted. It has been paralyzed, seemingly by obstruction from Republicans.

John Conyers has been a member of Congress for 42 (now 44) years. Among black people in Detroit, he is an icon. He espouses liberal causes that make him the darling of the left and of labor unions. He is the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. He has called for the impeachment of President Bush, and if there were to be an impeachment case, Conyers, as ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, would have a powerful say in how it’s run.

Those are potent reasons why Democrats might not want a probe of the dean of black congressmen.

But it could be worse than that. Some years ago, another Democratic congressman from Detroit, Charles Diggs, was convicted of fraud and served prison time for ordering House legislative aides to work at his family funeral home on government time. Recently, the indictment of U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay and the convictions of members like Randy Cunningham and Bob Ney are proof that congressmen who play fast and loose with House rules and with the law often are a short step from indictment.

A proper investigation of John Conyers in the Ethics Committee would have no trouble finding plenty of witnesses who would testify that as congressional employees hired by Conyers to work for constituents they instead were ordered by the congressman to do personal work for him resembling those funeral parlor assignments of Charles Diggs: They worked as chauffeurs for Conyers and his wife and kids, they were full time babysitters in the Conyers home or staffers’ own homes. Conyers’ former general counsel Sydney Rooks says Conyers assigned her to tutor Conyers’ oldest son — a daily chore that took place in the office during regular business hours with the use of the congressman’s fax machine to receive the boy’s daily homework assignments. Despite the supposed Ethics Committee inquiry, Conyers continued to assign his staffers to do personal chores like driving him in their own cars, babysitting his kids and picking up his meal tabs, according to Deanna Maher, who retired May 31, 2005 as chief of staff of Conyers’ Southgate, Mich. Office.

It may beat messing with dead bodies in a funeral home, but assigning staffers to work in a Chicago politician’s office and assigning aides to baby sit your kids and then representing to the congressional payroll office that these people were doing bona fide constituent work so they can cash government paychecks seems on a par with Charles Diggs’ duping the government into covering the payroll for his funeral parlor.

Could John Conyers be the reason the Ethics Committee — not to mention any move to strengthen ethics laws — is in limbo?

Contact me at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com

 

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Doggone market share

January 21, 2012

By Peppermint Patti JOTR Columnist Spell it backward, Sophie and GOD is DOG. DOG is who or whom I’m talking to in these columns. Or trying to. What with Internet censorship, it’s hard to get through. Most of my readers are two-leggers. Most of my dog friends — and ALL of my doggone market — [...]

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