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Pelosi involved in scandal: Paid husband with PAC funds

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Comments (5)

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This is a blow to Pelosi's reputation.

She may have just provided the justification needed to give her the boot!

"CHANGE" DC... get rid of the corruption and incompetence.

That and a few trainloads of dirt might add up to a mountain. Did Pelosi's bill pass? If not, this is still legal, I presume.

The story apparently has the wingnutosphere really excited this morning, enough to overload the wash times servers. The text of the story is included below in case you can't get to the link.

In the article we find that what she did was legal. She supported a bill to make it illegal, but the bill died in the Senate. So the "scandal" here is that she's doing something that the article notes is a "frequent" practice among members of Congress, and that is completely legal.

But maybe the wingnuts can get this on the front pages long enough to distract people from Palin's idiocy-du-jour.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has directed nearly $100,000 from her political action committee to her husband's real estate and investment firm over the past decade, a practice of paying a spouse with political donations that she supported banning last year.

Financial Leasing Services Inc. (FLS), owned by Paul F. Pelosi, has received $99,000 in rent, utilities and accounting fees from the speaker's "PAC to the Future" over the PAC's nine-year history.

The payments have quadrupled since Mr. Pelosi took over as treasurer of his wife's committee in 2007, Federal Election Commission records show. FLS is on track to take in $48,000 in payments this year alone - eight times as much as it received annually from 2000 to 2005, when the committee was run by another treasurer.

Lawmakers' frequent use of campaign donations to pay relatives emerged as an issue in the 2006 election campaigns, when the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal gave Democrats fodder to criticize Republicans such as former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas and Rep. John T. Doolittle of California for putting their wives on their campaign and PAC payrolls for fundraising work.

Last year, Mrs. Pelosi supported a bill that would have banned members of Congress from putting spouses on their campaign staffs. The bill - which passed the House in a voice vote but did not get out of a Senate committee - banned not only direct payments by congressional campaign committees and PACs to spouses for services including consulting and fundraising, but also "indirect compensation," such as payments to companies that employ spouses.


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Not to eat my own here but this is the type of shit we're trying to get rid of, right???
I do find the timing rather curious. She outfoxes the Republitards & the next day there's a political hatchet job on her in the Washington Times... hmmm...
It appears from the article that she didn't break the law but did go against a principal that she appears should prevail (what politician hasn't???).
I'm sure the ads are being produced as we speak.

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