Very, Very Dirty Harry Reid

The Senate MINORITY leader is a MAJOR embarrassment to the Dems.

Harry Reid has more dirty dealings.

It's not good for the leader of the Dems in the Senate to be exposed as hopelessly corrupt and ethically lax.

I suppose Dirty Harry thinks he can get away with his abuses because he has the lib media on his side and no one in his party will condemn him.

He may be right.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid has been using campaign donations instead of his personal money to pay Christmas bonuses for the support staff at the Ritz-Carlton where he lives in an upscale condominium. Federal election law bars candidates from converting political donations for personal use.

Questioned about the campaign expenditures by The Associated Press, Reid's office said Monday his lawyers had approved them but he nonetheless was personally reimbursing his campaign for the $3,300 he had directed to the staff holiday fund at his residence.

This guy thinks he's untouchable.

Using campaign donations for Christmas bonuses is such an abuse.

If I donated money to help a candidate get elected, I would be really ticked off if I found out the money had be used for the candidate's personal Christmas gift-giving.

Reid also announced he was amending his ethics reports to Congress to more fully account for a Las Vegas land deal, highlighted in an AP story last week, that allowed him to collect $1.1 million in 2004 for property he hadn't personally owned in three years.

This amending ethics reports stuff is such a joke.

It reminds me of Nancy Pelosi "cleaning up" her records and revising reality when she feared that her questionable behavior could become a problem.

In that matter, the senator hadn't disclosed to Congress that he first sold land to a friend's limited liability company back in 2001 and took an ownership stake in the company. He collected the seven-figure payout when the company sold the land again in 2004 to others.

Reid portrayed the 2004 sale as a personal sale of land, not mentioning the company's ownership or its role in the sale.

Reid said his amended ethics reports would list the 2001 sale and the company, called Patrick Lane LLC. He said the amended reports also would divulge two other smaller land deals he had failed to report to Congress.

Reid failed to report two more land deals?

The Senate MINORITY leader isn't very careful with his record keeping, is he?

...Reid labeled the AP story as the "latest attempt" by Republicans to affect the election. AP reported last week that it learned of the land deal from a former Reid adviser who had concerns about the way the deal was reported to Congress.

On the Ritz-Carlton holiday donations, Reid gave $600 in 2002, then $1,200 in 2004 and $1,500 in 2005 from his re-election campaign to an entity listed as the REC Employee Holiday Fund. His campaign listed the expenses as campaign "salary" for two of the years and as a "contribution" one year.

Reid's office said the listing as salary was a "clerical error" and that the use of campaign money for the residential fund was approved by his lawyers. "I am reimbursing the campaign from my own pocket to prevent this issue from being used in the current campaign season to deflect attention from Republican failures," he said.

Sure, I buy the "clerical error" excuse. The same "clerical error" was made on two occasions in two separate years. What a coincidence!

Squeaky clean Reid wouldn't do anything unethical. It's all a vast Associated Press conspiracy.

Riiiiiiiiight.

Reid gets caught misusing campaign donations and he tries to deflect attention away from his misdeeds by saying it's a Republican dirty trick.

Rather than accept responsibility for being a crook, he makes up excuses.

Very sleazy.

Residents and workers at the Ritz said the fund's full name is the Residents Executive Committee Holiday Fund and that it collects money each year from the condominium residents to help provide Christmas gifts, bonuses and a party for the support staff.

Federal election law permits campaigns to provide "gifts of nominal value" but prohibits candidates from using political donations for personal expenses, such as mortgage, rent or utilities for "any part of any personal residence."

The law specifically defines prohibited personal use expenses as any "obligation or expense of any person that would exist irrespective of the candidate's campaign or duties as a federal officeholder."

Seems pretty black and white to me.

Reid is a crook.

Land deeds show Reid and his wife, Landra, purchased a condominium for their Washington residence at the hotel for $750,000 in March 2001. The holiday fund has existed for years at the condo, workers said.

Reid said Monday he believed the expenses were permissible but he nonetheless was reimbursing the campaign.

Why would Reid believe that?

Is he incapable of grasping the very clear ethics rules?

"These donations were made to thank the men and women who work in the building for the extra work they do as a result of my political activities, and for helping the security officers assigned to me because of my Senate position," Reid said.

Larry Noble, the Federal Election Commission's former chief enforcement lawyer, said Reid's explanation is aimed at a "gray area" in the law by suggesting the donations were tied to his official Senate and political work.

"What makes this harder for the senator is that this is his personal residence and this looks like an event that everybody else at the residence is taking out of their personal money as they're living there," Noble said.

Reid is in a hole. He should quit digging.

The excuses make him appear like more of a slimeball than he already does.

...On the land dealings, Reid announced Monday he had failed to disclose two other transactions on his prior ethics reports and would account for those on his amended reports along with the 2001 sale.

The first, he said, involved the sale in 2004 of about one-third acre of land in 2004 he owned in his hometown of Searchlight, Nev. And he said he had not reported his ownership since 1985 of a quarter acre of land his brother gave him in 1985.

Reid said the failure to disclose those transactions previously was due to "clerical errors" and they amounted to "two minor matters that were inadvertently left off my original disclosure forms."

Clerical errors are really an issue for Reid.

He needs to get some new clerks.

...Reid's announcement came after numerous newspapers nationwide published editorials criticizing both his initial failure to disclose the full details of his Las Vegas land deal and his response to AP's story.

The $1.1 million land deal was engineered by Jay Brown, a longtime friend and former casino lawyer whose name surfaced in a major political bribery trial this summer and in other prior organized crime investigations. Brown has never been charged with wrongdoing, except for a 1981 federal securities complaint that was settled out of court.

Ethics experts told AP that Reid's inaccurate accounting of the deal to Congress appeared to violate Senate ethics rules and raised other issues concerning taxes and potential gifts.

Shouldn't it be a huge story that the leader of the Dems in the Senate has had some very shady dealings?

Of course, but it's not. Why not? Reid's a Dem.

I don't know why the Dems ignore this sort of corruption. They obviously have very low standards when it comes to ethical behavior.

If the Dems had any sense of decency, they would call for Reid to resign.

It would be a smart move in the long run to get him to step aside now.

Do the Dems really want Reid's relationship with Jack Abramoff to be put under the microscope?