COBURN OK
Sen. Tom Coburn is mulling an entry into the
Republican presidential primary, according to sources inside and
outside the Senate. Coburn, a senator from Oklahoma, is believed to
be receiving encouragement from a small group of wealthy
businessmen and philanthropists in the Oklahoma-Kansas-Texas region
of the country.
“He’s all about faith, lower taxes, and staying the course in
Iraq,” says an adviser outside of the Senate who has been speaking
to Coburn.
Coburn had been mulling a run earlier this year, but with what
appeared to be a crowded field, including two sitting Senators
(John McCain and Sam Brownback),
along with another seriously looking (Chuck
Hagel), Coburn appeared to pull back.
“He’s not bound to any timetable or any fundraising imperative,”
says a longtime adviser to Coburn, who has spoken with him. “What’s
important for him is that there is no other true, Reagan
conservative in the race, and he thinks he can fill that void.”
Coburn is believed to have the backing of several low-profile
members of the so called “Swift Boaters,” men who financed the ads
that doomed the presidential aspirations of Sen. John
Kerry.
CROSSED THE LINE
For all of the posturing by Democrats on the House Judiciary
Committee during the testimony of former Department of Justice
political appointee Monica Goodling, they and
their Democrat colleagues in the Clinton administration went to far
greater lengths to identify and track the political activities of
career and politically appointed lawyers in the Department of
Justice and elsewhere.
“We knew the political affiliation of every lawyer and political
appointee we hired at the Department of Justice from January 1993
to the end of the Administration,” says a former Clinton Department
of Justice political appointee. “We kept charts and used them when
it came time for new U.S. Attorney nominations, detailee
assignments, and other hiring decisions. If you didn’t vote
Democrat, you weren’t going anywhere with us. It was that
simple.”
In fact, according to this source, at least 25 career DOJ
lawyers who were identified as Republicans were shifted away from
jobs in offices they held prior to January 1993 and were given new
“assignments” which were deemed “noncritical” or “nonpolitically
influential.” When these jobs shifts came to light in 1993, neither
the House nor Senate Judiciary committees chose to pursue an
investigation.
“The difference between then and now, is that they [Department
of Justice] didn’t coordinate so openly with the White House,” says
a former Clinton White House staffer. “Remember, we had our own
separate database that we could cross check if we had names.
Everybody today forgets about the databases we created inside the
White House. It’s funny no one talks about that anymore. We were
doing stuff far more aggressively than this White House or the
Department of Justice did.”
