by Helen Tansey ©
Jack Abramoff’s “tell all” book “Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About Washington Corruption From America’s Most Notorious Lobbyist,” released today, and according to WND is a “tell all” expose that has the halls of Congress abuzz while also reverberating out to K Street and beyond. Abramoff’s book is being billed as a “lifting of the gossamer veil” of just how monstrously corrupt the entirety of the congressional club has become.
Politico’s MJ Lee reports that Abramoff recalled having “100 congressmen in his pocket” and the Washington Post details how Abramoff and his team of lobbyists were able to gain access and control over congressional staffers by suggesting they come and work for his firm –
Abramoff said he would often get access inside congressional offices by suggesting to key staffers that they come work for him when they were finished with their congressional careers.
“Assuming the staffer had any interest in leaving Capitol Hill for K Street — and almost 90 percent of them do — I would own him and, consequentially, the entire office,” Abramoff writes. “No rules had been broken, at least not yet. No one even knew what was happening, but suddenly, every move that staffer made, he made with his future at my firm in mind. His paycheck may have been signed by the Congress, but he was already working for me.”
Can you imagine? Think about this, the average American citizen has to jump through hoops to schedule a meeting with a Congress critter or his/her Chief of Staff, yet lobbyists know perfectly well to gain immediate access is through greasing the palms of the congressmen/women and their staff.
In short, Abramoff is telling us that Congress no longer represents the people, PERIOD.
Abramoff’s book will certainly shock your senses by detailing just how easy it is to buy an entire congressional staff, but it is just as important to understand how that money influences the passage of legislation.
Here is how it works. When a leader of either party receives hefty donations from those who are attempting to influence legislation, they in turn must deliver on whatever deal they agreed to. Delivering the goods, so to speak, means ensuring the votes of their respective caucus members – Republican or Democrat – and the numerous means used to keep them in line.
Following is just such a story. It is a “tell all” about one Democratic leader who has devised the most despicable strategy to keep his members, especially the incoming freshmen, in check and if they don’t tow the line, well the public is treated to some sort of sex scandal story designed to remove the problem –
Wayne Madsen Reports – Barney Frank operates a gay intimidation and Wall Street lobbying operation –
Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) has, according to well-placed congressional sources, used his office to hire openly gay staffers with the ultimate intent of later forcing them into senior staff positions for incoming Democratic freshmen members of Congress [emphasis added]. The operation, which has resulted in a steady increase in the number of gay and intimately-connected staffers in the House of Representatives, resembles the 2006 GOP House scandal, in which page sex scandal investigation target Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) was linked to a number of gay male staffers in his own office and those of ex-Representative Tom Reynolds (R-NY) and ex-House Speaker Dennis Hastert.
Barney Frank & Steve Gobie h/t Silvija
Frank is not a stranger to impropriety in his gay relationships. In the mid-1980s, Frank was reprimanded by his House colleagues for fixing the Congressional parking tickets for and not telling the truth about a gay escort named Paul Gobie. Gobie was also using Frank’s Capitol Hill residence to operate a gay escort service. Efforts to censure and expel Frank from the House were led by Rep. Larry Craig (R-ID), who, in 2007 as a U.S. Senator, would be arrested by a Minneapolis airport police officer for trying to solicit gay sex in a men’s restroom [emphasis added].
WMR has also discovered evidence that Frank hired a male staffer having an arrest record for molesting two underage teen males in New York state. It is believed that Frank maintained a relationship with the staffer until an incoming freshman Democratic House member was forced to hire the Frank staffer as his own chief-of-staff. Soon, the new member’s chief-of-staff began dealing with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Frank’s staff to ensure the new member, who did not support President Obama’s health care initiative, would be engulfed in a carefully contrived and engineered scandal and be forced from office.
Frank, the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, has also been embroiled in a conflict-of-interest in having one of his ex-gay staffers become a top lobbyist for Wall Street. Frank’s committee has oversight over Wall Street and Frank was involved in approving government bailout funds for Goldman Sachs and other “too-big-to-fail” Wall Street firms.
As a rather powerful leader within the Democratic Party, Barney Frank provides employment to his “pals” who would otherwise likely never aspire to public service work, who he then trains, pays handsomely and assigns to head-up incoming Democratic freshman’s offices where they serve Frank and by extension his donors NOT the freshman and his constituents.
Let’s take a closer look at how Frank’s operation works. The graphic below demonstrates his hierarchical structure. At the tippy top of the pyramid sits party “mega” donors, bundlers and lobbyists. These are the “Buyers”. At the next level is Ranking Member of the House Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank. He is the “Seller”. Then you have a third level below Frank creepily called the “Lavender Mafia” who owe their loyalty to him. These are the “Thugs”. Finally, at the very bottom of the pyramid sits all of the incoming freshmen, the sophomores, juniors and senior members. These are Frank’s “Victims”.
Now, following is a detailed account as to how Barney Frank’s operation works and how one freshman delegate, Eric Massa, found himself on the wrong side of the too big to be fired moron, yet on the right side of his constituents –
Wayne Madsen Reports ~ “Which office do I go to … to get my reputation back?”
“Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?” Those were the words of former Reagan Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan after he was acquitted on fraud charges on May 25, 1987.
Those same words and their attribution to Donovan appear on a t-shirt given to former Democratic U.S. Representative Eric Massa by a legal team representing the office of U.S. House Employment Counsel after their determination that Massa, a retired U.S. Navy Commander, did not sexually harass male members of his staff. Massa experienced a stormy resignation from Congress and a hasty departure from Washington after unsubstantiated rumors surfaced that he had engaged in inappropriate sexual contact with his male staffers. The rumors, as shall be described, emanated from a closely-connected group of gay congressional staffers on the Hill, many of whom once worked for openly gay Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank, the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, the chief overseer over Wall Street firms.
As the carefully-engineered “scandal” began to spell the end of Massa’s term as a House member, Massa recalled how then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel confronted him, naked, in the shower of the House gym, after Massa’s first eight weeks in office. Emanuel berated Massa for not supporting President Obama’s health care bill, poking Massa in the chest with his finger. It turns out that Emanuel, a former House member, spent every morning hanging around the House gym’s showers. Massa, just hours away from resigning his seat, told a radio interviewer that Emanuel was “the son of the devil’s spawn,” adding, “he is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive . . . ladies and gentlemen, you live today in a world that is so innocent as to not understand what’s going on in Washington, D.C.” [emphasis added]
At the time, Massa believed that it was his opposition to “Obamacare” that made him a target of Emanuel. However, WMR has learned that the effort to scandalize Massa had even deeper roots, roots that made the first-term congressman a problem for the power structure embedded in Washington, Wall Street, and Jerusalem.
Massa was a one-time aide to NATO military commander General Wesley Clark but had to retire from the Navy medical reasons having been diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Massa fully recovered from the cancer and ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House against GOP incumbent Randy Kuhl in 2006. In 2008, in a re-match in a Democratic year, Massa narrowly defeated Kuhl in the traditionally conservative Republican district, long dominated by its chief employer, Corning Glass, and its owners, the Houghton family. In fact, Kuhl’s predecessor was Amo Houghton, scion of the Corning owners, but a dying breed in the GOP — a social liberal and fiscal conservative. It was by adopting such a political brand that helped Massa best Kuhl for the normally Republican seat in 2008. It also helped that Clark and former president Bill Clinton campaigned for Massa. Not forthcoming with campaign help was Emanuel and his Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee money. Emanuel never supported Massa’s bid for the House.
However, Massa’s success resulted in a number of hidden agendas confronting him from the outset. Massa opposed natural gas “fracking” in his state of New York, not popular with the powerful oil and gas lobby; raised the red flags of treasonous behavior with top Pentagon brass as it became known that General David Petraeus, the commander of CENTCOM and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was meeting with top GOP officials, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, to plot out a run for the White House in 2012 against Petraeus’s own Commander-in-Chief; and opposed the Wall Street bailouts and pocket-lining inherent with Obama’s stimulus package and health care program.
But as much as his opposition to Obama, the gas industry, and the machinations of Petraeus may have placed him in jeopardy, it was Massa’s meeting with one of his constituents, in the far northern reaches of his 29th District, in Rochester, that spelled his doom, as many similar stances in the past have resulted in a trail of destroyed political careers, from Secretary of Defense James Forrestal to Senators Charles Percy and J. William Fulbright, and Representatives Paul Findlay, Pete McCloskey, James Traficant, and Cynthia McKinney.
In a carefully unpublicized meeting, Massa met with John Hrankowski, a survivor of the unprovoked and wilfull 1967 Israeli attack on the National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence collection ship, the USS Liberty and the chief promoter of the USS Liberty Memorial in Rochester, a landmark that was vigorously opposed by Jewish groups and the Israeli Lobby. Hrankowski died in March but the memorial in honor of the 34 US Navy and NSA personnel killed by Israeli aircraft strafing and torpedo boats, as well as the rest of the crew, lives on, despite the concerted efforts by many American Jews and the Israel Lobby to obliterate the memory of the ship from history.
Already considered by the House leadership, including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, whose sister was once the executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), as not in lockstep with the Obama and Emanuel agenda, Massa was targeted in a campaign by a powerful group that is only whispered about on Capitol Hill — the “Lavender Mafia,” a group of openly and closeted gay staffers with close links, including past employment, with the office of Barney Frank [emphasis added].
Upon winning his seat in 2008, Massa was forced by the House Democratic leadership to accept as his chief-of-staff a gay Frank staffer, Joe Racalto, a one-time intern and driver for Frank who was brought into Frank’s office by Robert Raben, a former Frank counsel and now the head of the Raben Group, which counts some of Wall Street’s top firms as clients, firms over which Frank has oversight authority.
After Massa met with Hrankowski, a person described as Massa’s “AIPAC overseer,” approached him and asked why he had met with the former Liberty crewman. There was an obvious leak in Massa’s office. Soon, Racalto began conspiring with Frank’s chief of staff to undermine Massa with a contrived sex scandal. Massa’s “salty” Navy language around his office began to be twisted into “sexual harassment” issues, including later charges by Racalto that he had been harassed by Massa.
In a Closing Argument made by House Office of Compliance attorneys Gloria Lett, Victoria Botvin, and Randall Robertson, it is stated: “Racalto never once alleged that he had been sexually harassed by Massa, and never once reported or complained about anyone that he had been sexually harassed . . . In short, this sexual harassment action is just one more of Racalto’s strategic attempts to unjustly enrich himself through a calculated and manipulative series of lies.” Helping Racalto in his “legal defense fund” is none other than Raben, the Wall Street lobbyist.
WMR has also learned from 29th District sources that Racalto maintained a relationship with Massa’s announced GOP challenger, Tom Reed, at the same time that Racalto served as Massa’s chief of staff. Reed, who was the mayor of Corning and is married with children, had been implicated in an attempt to conduct a sexual foursome after meeting two of Massa’s female staffers in a Corning bar. Whether Racalto used this information to cut a side deal for future favors from Reed is not known but it is clear that a relationship developed between Massa’s chief of staff and his Republican challenger.
There is little doubt that Massa faced two formidable but hidden oppoents: Rahm Emanuel, who never supported Massa’s bid for the House, and Karl Rove, the GOP’s rottweiler on keeping Democrats out of safe GOP districts. But could Emanuel and Rove have worked together, through people like Frank, Reed, Racalto, and others, to topple Massa? Such a scenario is likely considering that Rove’s 2012 candidate, Mitt Romney, is benefiting from the sex scandal meltdown of pizza magnate Herman Cain. There are reports that some of the sexual dirt on Cain originated with Rahm Emanuel, now the mayor of Chicago, placing Rove and Emanuel in the same sty of political mud [emphasis added].
However, blackmailable information is the stock-in-trade for the “Lavender Mafia.” New York Democratic Representative Bernard Higgins, who is married and represents the Buffalo area 27th District, has not been thrown out of Congress, even though congressional sources report that Higgins shares a bed in a Washington apartment with a male staffer.
In a series of e-mails obtained by WMR, it is clear that Massa was the subject of unsubstantiated rumor mongering and that rumors served as the basis for The Washington Post’s exaggerated reporting on Massa’s “alleged” conduct beyond the use of “salty language.” In one e-mail, dated March 9, 2010, from the Post’s Carol Leonnig to Racalto, she states “we will be reporting that allegations [emphasis added] involving Cong. Massa involved far more than ‘salty language,” based on numerous allegations of a pattern of physical sexual harassment of male staffers in his office and groping.” However, there was never any formal complaints about such behavior from Massa’s staffers, including his own chief of staff who only filed charges after Massa’s resignation, charges that were rejected by the House Office of Compliance’s counsels.
As far as “salty language,” Massa’s language was no more “salty” than that used by fellow Navy veteran Senator John McCain, whose foul mouth in the Congress is legendary, and the equally “salty” Baltimore longshoreman’s language from Senator Barbara Mikulski.
In an e-mail, dated March 4, 2010, from Scott Brown, a reporter for WGRZ-TV in Buffalo, to Racalto, it is stated that Hoyer’s office was informed about Massa’s alleged activities on February 8 and that Massa’s staff, again according to Hoyer’s office, had notified the Ethics Committee within 48 hours. Brown said that before Politico reported on the Ethics Committee probe, Massa said he was unaware of it. Racalto was allowing the manufactured scandal to grow legs of its own. In another March 4, 2010, e-mail, Raymond Hernandez of The New York Times, wrote Racalto: “In the email you sent last night, you said that there has been no formal complaint filed with the Ethics Committee. That is at odds with the statement released by Majority Leady [sic] Steny Hoyer. Could you explain this inconsistency? In addition, you said that Mr. Massa had not been contacted by the committee. But it is my understanding that representatives of the committee visited his office yesterday. Has the congressman or any person on his staff been contacted by the committee?”
Racalto’s response to Hernandez: “Congressman Massa has not been contacted by the Committee on Official Standards and Conduct. It is obvious that Congressman cannot comment on a matter about which he has been given no information and I am unable to comment because there is no formal complaint to comment on.”
Then, Racalto, adds in a statement worthy of the Kremlin during the Cold War, “Congressman Massa is retiring for health reasons.”
On February 26 and 27, Racalto was in e-mail communication with Frank’s chief of staff Maria Giesta. It was clear that Racalto and Giesta were conspiring to bring the unsubstantiated allegations against Massa to a head and the role of Frank’s office in undermining Massa cannot be emphasized more. After all, the only thing that Frank is more committed to than gay rights is support for Israel and Frank had the means, via his Lavender Mafia, and the desire to see Massa dumped from the House. Click here for an unusual e-mail exchange between Giestra and Racalto.
Maria E. Giesta,
Chief of Staff and Staff Director
Congressman Barney Frankto Racalto: By the way honey do you have some extra Viagra
Racalto to Giesta: Sorry, fell asleep – yes I do.
Giesta to Racalto: I hope you’re OK
I need one of you spare it [another e-mail from Giestra requests a Dr. Patel’s phone number.]Racalto to Giesta: At airport – have a mtg with lawyers at 11
Giesta to Racalto: Where are you going?
Racalto to Giesta: I’m meeting with attorneys in nyc – I want to make sure we are all set legally (if this investigation goes formal)
Then, on March 7, Giesta tips her hand on Frank’s role in Massa’s “scandal” in an e-mail to Racalto:
Giesta to Racalto: Make sure you get your severence [sic] before going postal on Massa. [Congressional sources have told WMR that in mid-March 2010, Racalto promised to all Massa staffers who levelled sexual harassment charges against Massa that they would receive $300,000 each.] [Racalto also falsely represented to Massa’s campaign committee that he was due $40,000 as a “campaign management fee,” which Massa denies was authorized. The media spin was that the $40,000 was some sort of “hush money.”]
On February 26, there was the following from Giesta to Racalto: Hi. I can definitely loan you some money – no problem.
On February 22, Racalto was, according to his House e-mail, negotiating a $50 – 60,000 job with AIDS Community Resources.
On February 26, in a harbinger of what would befall Massa, Giesta sent another e-mail to Racalto:
Well it looks like Patterson [sic] is not going to run for Governor – good news!!
[The reference is to New York Democratic Governor David Paterson, who succeeded Governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned after another contrived sex “scandal.”]
Massa is now unemployed in Corning and wonders if he can hold on to his house. He muses while raking leaves on his lawn how much more of a difference he could make if he were able to speak during House “special orders” on the problems of Wall Street and the outrageous behavior of Washington politics that puts special interests first and citizens at the bottom of the priority list. However, in a city of deception and perfidy, there is no office where Massa can go to get his reputation back.
Meanwhile, for Frank, his staffers, and the congressional “Lavender Mafia,” the Viagra, crystal meth, and booze continue to make for a gay old time.
The Answer –
What does an accountant, radio announcer, janitor and the Lavender Mafia all have in common? All of them, every single one of them gamed the system and betrayed you and me. Jack Abramoff is now a Pizzeria accountant, former Congressman Bob Ney is a part-time Radio Announcer, Neil Voltz is now a janitor but served as Ney’s Chief of Staff and the Lavender Mafia, well they are hard at work creating false sex scandals out of thin air thereby destroying once respectable congressmen’s careers.
And by gaming the system these men along with former and current gamers have single-handedly destroyed any semblance of representative government.
Between exposing just this one member’s operation, I’m sure all of the leadership have their own unique modus operandi in place to bully their members in line, coupled with Abramoff’s “tell all” account of the ease in which he bought his clients the loyalty of entire congressional offices, one must pause to allow the gravity of the unvarnished truth to sink in. These aren’t just odd incidences. These are the norm. Those who have the financial wherewithal to throw money around to gain favor is greedily received by those the people vote into office to represent them but in fact, they demonstrate over and again their only loyalty to the money and power by relentlessly controlling and destroying their own Party members! This system is beyond sick and likely beyond any kind of repair. Every elected member of congress, every single one of them, has been thoroughly compromised.
These people do not represent America. These people do not care about you and me. These people, once inside that hell hole, must toe these despicable leaders line if they are to survive. Good and decent people don’t have a chance!
Think about it. Now there is the talk about an invasion on Iran, ah geez, don’t even get me started, but I ask, sincerely, do you honestly believe your congressman/woman is representing you let alone your children? Our nation? If your answer is no, then why in the hell do they keep being re elected?
###
About the author of the Lavender Mafia/Mass/Frank story – Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. He has written for several renowned papers and blogs. Madsen is a regular contributor on Russia Today. He has been a frequent political and national security commentator on Fox News and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and MS-NBC. Madsen has taken on Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity on their television shows. He has been invited to testifty as a witness before the US House of Representatives, the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and an terrorism investigation panel of the French government. As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy. He subsequently worked for the National Security Agency, the Naval Data Automation Command, Department of State, RCA Corporation, and Computer Sciences Corporation. Madsen is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), Association for Intelligence Officers …
###
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.