Nevada governor faces string of scandals, criminal investigation

Nevada governor faces string of scandals

By KATHLEEN HENNESSEY, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 18 minutes ago

Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt, it has become customary to take stock of a politician's first 100 days in office. Here's what Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons' 100 days include: Four scandals or more. One criminal investigation. One $10,000 dress. And a possible $137 million budget shortfall.

No charges have been brought against the Republican governor. But the tumult has made the dawn of his administration a dreary one.

"He has very little political currency to work with" in dealing with Legislature, where the Republicans control the Senate and the Democrats the Assembly, said GOP operative Steve Wark.

In what may be the most serious threat yet, the FBI has opened a corruption investigation into the former five-term congressman's relationship with a defense contractor. A former partner at the company has alleged that Gibbons received money, travel, poker chips and other favors to help it win government contracts.

Also, recent disclosures that Gibbons' wife, a former state assemblywoman and wedding chapel owner, was a paid consultant for another defense contractor have raised more questions about her husband's time on the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees.

Despite the series of "Gibbons denies ... " headlines, the 62-year-old governor said he is unfazed.

"I think, first of all, the first 100 days have been, you know, terrific for me, I've been able to do a lot," he said, citing progress on bills dealing with schools, sex offenders and tax relief for homeowners. He vowed: "I will not let these claims knock me off course."

Gibbons has hired Washington lawyer Abbe Lowell, who represented disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, to handle the federal investigation.

The troubles have given Gibbons no time to gain his footing from other scandals that broke during his campaign: a Las Vegas cocktail waitress' assertion that he assaulted her in a parking garage after she rebuffed his advances, and a Peruvian housekeeper's claim that she worked for Gibbons while in this country illegally.

In December, weeks after Gibbons was elected, police said they found insufficient evidence to support the waitress' claims. And the housekeeper issue has all but disappeared — mostly because of the governor's more recent troubles.

Gibbons, a former fighter pilot particularly popular in conservative rural Nevada, got elected with 48 percent of the vote in a state where none-of-the-above is an option. But his approval rating stood at a miserable 29 percent in March.

By his seventh week in office, boos echoed louder than cheers when Gibbons was introduced at a college basketball game in his hometown of Reno.

Some bloggers are talking recall. Republicans are tiptoeing.

"There are a lot of people out here who normally would come out and defend Jim Gibbons," said GOP consultant Chuck Muth. But he said "a lot of Republicans are hedging their bets" because of the parallels to former California Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who went to prison for taking bribes from military contractors.

The governor had largely stayed mum on the allegations until earlier this week. After The Wall Street Journal reported that he was under investigation for his ties to Warren Trepp, a longtime friend who owns a Reno military software company, the governor suggested he may be the subject of a conspiracy.

"I have heard that actually the Democrat Party paid to have these Wall Street Journal articles written," Gibbons told the Reno Gazette Journal.

The Journal and state Democrats denied any collusion. When pressed, Gibbons later said he didn't believe the rumors.

State Senate Minority Leader Dina Titus, a Democrat who lost to Gibbons in November, suggested the governor was "losing touch with reality."

The administration also has been troubled by smaller dustups.

Gibbons got off to a bad start right away when he secretly called for a midnight swearing-in on Jan. 1. He cited homeland security concerns — the need to have someone in charge at all times, without interruption — but it was widely viewed as a maneuver to undo a key appointment made by his GOP predecessor.

The governor was mocked by Democrats when he acknowledged he had only a "peripheral knowledge" of a $60 million education program he had made a key part of his State of the State speech.

And a press release from the first lady's office describing a $10,000 velvet Giorgio Armani ensemble purchased for the inaugural balls elicited jeers for the fiscal conservative. (The dress was paid for with contributions, not tax dollars.)

Gibbons also angered conservatives when he submitted a budget raising fees, after pledging not to do so. He later removed the increases.

Last month, after a furor over the $194,000 defense fund that Gibbons set up to deal with the various allegations against him, the Nevada secretary of state concluded that the fund did not violate the state's campaign finance laws.

Muth, like Gibbons himself, is not writing the governor off yet.

"Politics for both parties is a roller coaster. We're down right now," Muth said, "but the good news is you only go up from here."

Fine Print in Defense Bill Opens Door to Martial Law

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY – SpyTalk
Dec. 1, 2006 – 8:25 p.m.

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

It’s amazing what you can find if you turn over a few rocks in the anti-terrorism legislation Congress approved during the election season.

Take, for example, the John W. Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2006, named for the longtime Armed Services Committee chairman from Virginia.

Signed by President Bush on Oct. 17, the law (PL 109-364) has a provocative provision called “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies.”

The thrust of it seems to be about giving the federal government a far stronger hand in coordinating responses to Katrina-like disasters.

But on closer inspection, its language also alters the two-centuries-old Insurrection Act, which Congress passed in 1807 to limit the president’s power to deploy troops within the United States.

That law has long allowed the president to mobilize troops only “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”

But the amended law takes the cuffs off.

Specifically, the new language adds “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident” to the list of conditions permitting the President to take over local authority — particularly “if domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order.”

Since the administration broadened what constitutes “conspiracy” in its definition of enemy combatants — anyone who “has purposely and materially supported hostilities against the United States,” in the language of the Military Commissions Act (PL 109-366) — critics say it’s a formula for executive branch mischief.

Yet despite such a radical turn, the new law garnered little dissent, or even attention, on the Hill.

One of the few to complain, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., warned that the measure virtually invites the White House to declare federal martial law.

It “subverts solid, longstanding posse comitatus statutes that limit the military’s involvement in law enforcement, thereby making it easier for the President to declare martial law,” he said in remarks submitted to the Congressional Record on Sept. 29.

“The changes to the Insurrection Act will allow the President to use the military, including the National Guard, to carry out law enforcement activities without the consent of a governor,” he said.

Moreover, he said, it breaks a long, fundamental tradition of federal restraint.

“Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.”

And he criticized the way it was rammed through Congress.

It “was just slipped in the defense bill as a rider with little study,” he fumed. “Other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals.”

No matter: Safely tucked into the $526 billion defense bill, it easily crossed the goal line on the last day of September.

Silence

The language doesn’t just brush aside a liberal Democrat slated to take over the Judiciary Committee come January. It also runs over the backs of the governors, 22 of whom are Republicans.

The governors had waved red flags about the measure on Aug. 1, csending letters of protest from their Washington office to the Republican chairs and ranking Democrats on the House and Senate Armed Services committees.

No response. So they petitioned the party heads on the Hill — Sens. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Harry Reid, D-Nev., Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and his Democratic opposite, Nancy Pelosi of California.

“This provision was drafted without consultation or input from governors,” said the Aug. 6 letter signed by every member of the National Governors Association, “and represents an unprecedented shift in authority from governors . . .to the federal government.”

“We urge you,” they said, “to drop provisions that would usurp governors’ authority over the National Guard during emergencies from the conference agreement on the National Defense Authorization Act.”

Again, no response from the leadership, said David Quam, the National Governors Association’s director of federal relations.

On Aug. 31, the governors sent another letter to the congressional party leaders, as well as to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who had met quietly with an NGA delegation back in February.

The bill “could encroach on our constitutional authority to protect the citizens of our states,” they protested, complaining again about how the provision had been dumped on a midnight express.

“Any issue that affects the mission of the Guard in the states must be addressed in consultation and coordination with governors,” they demanded.

“The role of the Guard in the states and to the nation as a whole is too important to have major policy decisions made without full debate and input from governors throughout the policy process.”

More silence.

“We did not know until the bill was printed where we stood,” Quam said.

That’s partly the governors’ own fault, said a Republican Senate aide.

“My understanding is that they sent form letters to offices,” she said. “If they really want a piece of legislation considered they should have called offices and pushed the matter. No office can handle the amount of form letters that come in each day.”

Quam disputed that.

“The letter was only the beginning of the conversation,” he said. “The NGA and the governors’ offices reached out across the Hill.”

Blogosphere

Looking back at the government’s chaotic response to Katrina, it’s not altogether surprising that the provision drew so little opposition in Congress and attention from the mainstream media.

And of course, it was wrapped in a monster defense bill related to the emergency in Iraq.

But the blogosphere, of course, was all over it.

A close analysis of the bill by Frank Morales, a 58-year-old Episcopal priest in New York who occasionally writes for left-wing publications, spurred a score of liberal and conservative libertarian Web sites to take a look at it.

But a search of The Washington Post and New York Times archives, using the terms “Insurrection Act,” “martial law” and “Congress,” came up empty.

That’s not to say the papers don’t care: There’s just too much going on in the global war on terror to keep up with, much less write about such a seemingly insignificant provision. The martial law section of the Defense Appropriation Act, for example, takes up just a few paragraphs in the 591-page document.

What else is in there? More intriguing stuff, it looks like — and I’m working my way through it.

BACKCHANNEL CHATTER

Putin on the Risk: Don’t be too quick to finger Russian president Vladimir Putin in the radiation rub-out of disaffected former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London Nov. 23, says a retired CIA operative who spent a career trying to outwit his Soviet opposites. “I see it all as a little too pat,” says Milt Bearden, a 30-year CIA veteran and chief of its Soviet/East European Division when the Kremlin crumbled in 1990.

“Is Putin insane or stupid? I think not,” Bearden e-mailed me last week.

“I tilt toward a setup,” Bearden said. The villain? “Someone with the [scientific] resources of a state,” a large research laboratory, perhaps, with connections to the criminal underworld.

“This story has legs,” Bearden went on, “just what Putin would not want if he was behind it.”

Stay tuned...

More on Torture Law: Most legal analysts, as reported here last week, believe that the new law setting up Military Commissions will exempt U.S. officials from prosecution for abusing prisoners, by narrowing the definitions of torture in the 1997 War Crimes Act. But at least one eminent jurist begs to differ.

“Even as retroactively amended and narrowed, a person whose actions caused ‘serious’ or ‘severe’ mental or physical suffering at any time after 1997 committed a felony violation of the War Crimes Act and can be prosecuted,” maintains Stephen Rickard, a former top State Department official, foreign policy adviser to the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., and prominent Washington lawyer with a speciality in human rights.

“I don’t like the definitions of ‘torture’ and ‘cruel and inhuman’ conduct,” Rickard e-mailed me last week, “but even with all of their flaws, I don’t see how they exempt interrogators from potential punishment, especially for the harshest, most controversial techniques.”

These days Rickard is the director of the Washington Office of the liberal Open Society Institute.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

Source: CQ Homeland Security
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