David Fiderer: Charges Against Maxine Waters Conflate Secretarial Tasks W/ "Crafting Legislation"

[Hissyspit]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-fiderer/the-charges-against-maxin_b_676966.html

David Fiderer
Banker/Writer
Posted: August 10, 2010 11:06 AM

The Charges Against Maxine Waters Conflate Secretarial Tasks With "Crafting Legislation"

- snip -

The Committee's case against Waters depends on the meaning of "it." Apparently, Waters took Frank's admonition to mean that she should take no role in drafting legislation. (As noted here previously, the House Ethics Manual clearly states that a member may vote on legislation affecting his own business interests. The standards for other types of actions are undefined.) The Committee interpreted Frank's remark to mean that her office should break off all contact with OneUnited, as if the bank were a litigant in a pending criminal trial.

Waters' office did keep the NBA and OneUnited apprised as to how things were moving forward. Why didn't OneUnited contact Frank's office directly? The answer seems obvious to anyone who remembers what happened during the week subsequent to the meeting with Treasury. On September 18, Hank Paulson informed Congress that a financial meltdown was imminent and that he needed unlimited authority, with zero accountability, in order to save capitalism. The Chairman of the Financial Services Committee and his staffers suddenly become extremely busy; they could not respond to emails and phone calls. Frank and others, who found Paulson's request unacceptable, were forced to quickly draft TARP legislation from scratch.

According to the Committee Statement, it was during this period, late September 2008, that Waters' Chief of staff, Mikael Moore, who happens to be Waters' grandson, "was actively involved in assisting OneUnited in their request for capital from Treasury and crafting legislation to authorize Treasury to grant the request."

How was Mikael Moore involved in "crafting legislation"? By opening up the .doc file and sending it to the printer, and handing over the hard copy. Really. That's what Committee Statement alleges. Check out Exhibit 12 of the OCE report. It shows an email, dated September 22, 2008, from OneUnited's lawyer, Leander Foley, to OneUnited's CEO, Kevin Cohee. The email attachment includes some draft legislation. Cohee then forwarded the message to Moore, and asked Moore to print out the document for Cohee prior to his meeting.

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Members of the House are not stupid. Or at least most of them aren't. They know the difference between crafting legislation and forwarding email messages, or printing out someone else's work product. They know that the claim that Moore "helped craft legislation" is a trivialization of the process, an insult to their intelligence.

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[EFerrari]

1. That's it in a nutshell.

The referral from House Ethics conflates what the bank people did with how Maxine's office tried to handle them.

[DURHAM D]

2. This is an embarrassing finding for Speaker Pelosi's ethics committee.

Dismissed.