The quietest Senate investigation ever

July 29, 2005

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) got into a little trouble last August when he divulged classified intercepted messages to the media while serving on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Specifically, Fox News’ Carl Cameron confirmed to FBI investigators that Shelby verbally divulged information to him during a June 2002 interview, literally minutes after Shelby’s committee had been given the information in a classified briefing.

Shelby was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee for over five years. He, of all people, knows all about legal restrictions on passing classified information over to the media, leaving him no excuse for this kind of recklessness. Hell, it didn’t even meet Fox’s standards — Cameron did not air the information Shelby gave him. What’s more, the leak even led to a low-key federal criminal investigation of Shelby.

And when I say “low-key,” I mean practically invisible. We’re talking about a sitting senator becoming the subject of two investigations, one of them criminal, and no one has talked about it. Someday, someone is going to have to explain to me how Republicans are able get away with so much. (Imagine, just for a moment, if a Dem senator was under a similar investigation. Do you suppose we might hear about it on Fox News?)

Nevertheless, the investigation into Shelby’s conduct will wrap up in a couple of months. Care to guess why it’s taking so long?

The Senate Select Committee on Ethics is expected to end its investigation of alleged classified leaks by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) in the next eight to 10 weeks, according to a source familiar with the probe.

The pace has been slowed by difficulties obtaining information, difficulties created partly by Sen. Pat Roberts’s (R-Kan.) decision not to recuse himself from the case, the source said. The investigation has been conducted “off and on” for six months.

That’s quite a Republican Senate caucus we have here. Shelby divulges classified intercepted messages to the media, and Roberts, on top of his other mischief, slows down the investigation.

It’s a Congress we can truly be proud of, isn’t it?

It’s time to drag out the Mark Twain quotes:

The lightning there is peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn’t leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether–Well, you’d think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there.
– Mark Twain’s Speeches, “The Weather”

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
– Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar

It is the foreign element that commits our crimes. There is no native criminal class except Congress.
– More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927

Whiskey is carried into committee rooms in demijohns and carried out in demagogues.
– Notebook, 1868

…I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature, Congressman.
– “Foster’s Case”, New York Tribune, 3/10/1873

To which I’ll add my Dad’s observation (he worked for a two-term Congressman during the New Deal): “The ones that are awake and sober are liars and thieves.”

  • I’ll explain why republics get away with so much but democrats don’t (but I think you already know). When democrats do something, republics make sure they pay the price, at least in the press. When republics do something, the democrats do nothing or, at least, very little.

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