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Unnamed GOP Senator Blocking Appointment Of Key Bailout OverseerNovember 28

Here's an interesting nugget in Congress's response to the financial crisis that hasn't received as much attention as it deserves.

Earlier this month, the Bush administration nominated Neil Barofsky, a federal prosecutor, to be the Treasury Department's special inspector general on the bailout program. That's a crucial post, given the astronomical sums at issue, the broad authority that Treasury has been given to distribute them, the concerns that have been raised about possible conflicts of interest, and the general urgency of our efforts to prevent an economic collapse.

So you'd think Congress would be doing everything it could to get Barofsky confirmed right away. You'd be wrong.

Last week, Sen. Chris Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the banking committee, issued a little-noticed statement saying that although the nomination "was cleared by members of the Senate Banking Committee, the leadership of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and all Democratic Senators," it was "blocked on the floor by at least one Republican member." (itals ours.)

Senate rules allow any senator to anonymously block a vote on confirmation to any federal post, for any reason.

The rationale fo

Report: Top Obama Transition Staffer Led "Backdoor" Lobbying Campaign For Fannie MaeNovember 17

Change we can believe in?

Last week, the Obama transition team announced that it had tapped veteran Beltway Democrat Thomas Donilon to help lead its review of operations at the State Department. As multiple news outlets quickly pointed out, until 2005 Donilon helped oversee the aggressive lobbying operation of troubled mortgage giant Fannie Mae.

Now, ABCNews.com has fleshed out the picture a bit, reporting that Donilon oversaw what it describes as a "backdoor lobbying campaign ... to undermine the credibility of a probe into the firm's accounting irregularities."

The details, which center on a campaign to discredit an agency charged with overseeing the company:

The effort -- which reportedly included attacks on the funding for the oversight agency, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, and an attempt to launch a separate investigation into OFHEO itself -- was ultimately unsuccessful, and regulators eventually discovered top Fannie Mae executives had been manipulating the company's financial reporting to maximize their bonuses.

Donilon was not found to be involved in the financial manipulations, but he did help
give Fannie's board the misimpression that the company was in good financial health, according to the OFHEO

Siegelman: New Revelations "More Frightening Than Anything That Came Before."November 14

Former Alabama governor Don Siegelman says that new revelations about his prosecution amount to "outrageous criminal conduct in the US Attorney's office and the Department of Justice," and are "more frightening than anything that has come before." And he believes that his case is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of politicized prosecutions by DOJ.

Siegelman was reacting in an interview with TPMmuckraker to the news, first reported this morning by Time, that the US Attorney on his case, who had recused herself because her husband was a top GOP operative who had worked closely with Karl Rove -- and even run the 2002 campaign of Siegelman's gubernatorial opponent -- continued to advise prosecutors on the case.

At times while speaking to TPMmuckraker, Siegelman appeared to have trouble maintaining his composure. He called the news -- which came from a whistleblower in the US Attorney's office who passed on emails and other information to the House Judiciary Commitee -- "another shocking revelation in the misconduct of the US attorneys offices and the DOJ."

The news appears to contradict previous statements from DOJ on the matter. When Congress investigated the affair earlier this year, DOJ had said that the US Attorney, Leura Canary, had recused herself "before any signif

Senate Dems To White House: Preserve Records (Especially You, Cheney)November 13

Democrats from the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees last week sent a letter to the White House demanding that it preserve all records produced by the Bush administration. The letter, obtained by the Associated Press, expressed particular concern that the office of Vice President Cheney would not comply with the law.

The letter, sent by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Sen. John D. Rockefeller of West Virginia and Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, asks White House counsel Fred Fielding to detail steps being taken to preserve White House documents and hand them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.

And it asks whether Fielding has investigated a Washington Post report that the White House has kept some presidential orders off it records, in a safe in the office of the vice president's lawyer.

Cheney's office is separately involved in a lawsuit brought by the watchdog group CREW, which is seeking to ensure that all vice presidential records are made available to the public.

The Democrats' letter cites that litigation, noting, "the declarations filed in that case by the Office of the Vice President raise serious concerns about its interpretations of the (Presidential Records Act)."

The law requires all presidential and vice presidential records to be transferred to the N

Before Recount, GOP Smearing Minnesota Sec Of StateNovember 11

The recount in the Minnesota Senate race hasn't even begun yet, but already the GOP is working to delegitimize it in advance, by smearing the man who will run it as a partisan Democrat.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) has been distributing to reporters a three-page "backgrounder" that attacks Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a Democrat, for having spoken at the Democratic convention this summer, and for having "led a voter registration coalition that included ACORN," among other alleged sins.

In the first vote count, Republican incumbent Norm Coleman currently holds an edge of around 200 votes over Democratic challenger Al Franken, though that number may continue to dwindle as more votes are counted. Either way, the margin is easily close enough to require a recount under state law, which will begin next week under Ritchie's supervision.

Despite the backgrounder's sometimes hysterical compilation of anti-Ritchie greatest hits -- it claims that "the Communist Party USA Wrote Encouragingly Of His Candidacy," citing an unsourced line from a report in the Minneapolis Star Tribue -- there's no evidence that Ritchie has ever used his role as the state's top elections administrator to advantage Democrats.

But that likely misses the point of the GOP gambit, which appears to be to cast pu