On Thursday, Congressman Joe Sestak took the centuries old
position of all children in trouble: my brother did it.
And his brother? Richard Sestak, the candidate’s campaign
guru, is now conspiring behind the scenes with the White House on
what to say. According to Joe Sestak himself.
In a stunning admission Thursday, the same day President
Obama answered Fox News White House correspondent Major Garrett’s
question on the issue at the President’s first press conference
in almost a year, the Washington Post is
reporting this morning that Sestak is now admitting:
“They (the White House) got hold of my brother on his
cellphone, and he spoke to the White House… about what’s going
to occur,” said Sestak, who said he expects the White House
will release its information Friday. He declined to elaborate
on his discussions with his brother.
Get that last line: Congressman Sestak “declined to
elaborate on his discussions with his brother.”
In other words, in yet another startling revelation, Sestak
is now confessing the White House is coordinating their story
with his brother — collaborating on the same day the President
was insisting to the nation:
“I can assure the public that nothing improper took
place.”
The Joe Sestak admission that brother and campaign
strategist Richard Sestak is coordinating a future Sestak
response with the White House — a response expected as soon as
today — is certain to increase calls for a special prosecutor.
It launches a whole news series of questions:
• What did
Richard Sestak and Joe Sestak know, and when did they know
it?
• Who from the
White House called Richard Sestak yesterday or at any time this
week?
• What
specifically did Richard Sestak and the unnamed White House
official discuss?
• Were there
differences in the versions of this story between either of the
Sestaks and the White House?
• Did Richard
Sestak collaborate in any fashion with the shaping of either the
White House statement or any future statement from his brother in
response to whatever the White house will be saying?
• Has Richard
Sestak had any other communications with anyone in the White
House since his brother’s February 19th admission that he, Joe
Sestak, was offered a job by the White House?
Perhaps even more startling in his fifteen minute
conversation with reporters in the Capitol on Thursday,
Congressman Sestak, according to the Post:
…declined to say whether the alleged job offer was
inappropriate and defended Obama’s integrity. “I think the
president’s a pretty legitimate, you know, person,” he said.
In other words, Joe Sestak himself — by refusing a chance
provided by reporters to say nothing wrong or illegal occurred —
appears to believe that the job offer was in fact wrong. Or
“inappropriate” as the Post politely describes this. He
flatly refused a chance provided by reporters to say everything
was on the up-and-up.
He chose instead to make a general remark that “the
president’s a pretty legitimate, you know, person.”
In a particularly bizarre turn of events, Washington
Post reporter Paul Kane tried to compare the Sestak story to
the offer of high-level jobs in the Obama administration to then
Senator Joe Biden (Vice President), Senator Hillary Clinton
(Secretary of State), Congressman Rahm Emanuel (White House Chief
of Staff), Senator Ken Salazar (Secretary of the Interior) and
Congresswoman Hilda Solis (Secretary of Labor). There is no
evidence anywhere, of course, that these jobs were offered in
exchange for “anything of value” — one of several quite specific
conditions enumerated in federal law. Had, for example, Obama
gone to then-Senators Biden and Clinton early in 2008 and said:
“Joe and Hillary, if you will not run for president against me I
will make Joe Vice President and Hillary Secretary of State” then
Obama would indeed have been in very deep legal waters. As would
Biden and Clinton.
As mentioned in my
initial story on this here on February 22, just such a public
accusation was made by a Democratic governor against then-Senator
John F. Kennedy in the race for the 1960 Democratic presidential
nomination. The charge was angrily denied by JFK, quite
specifically and correctly telling historian Theodore H. White at
the time that “it is a federal offense to offer any man a federal
job in return for a favor.”
Meanwhile, there is a second leg to this story — in
Colorado. The potential involvement in this story of outgoing
Colorado Governor Bill Ritter.
There Democrat Andrew Romanoff, running against incumbent
Senator Michael Bennet, was reported by the Denver Post
last September to have received a similar jobs-for-withdrawal
offer from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina. That
story can be found here.
Romanoff refused the offer — and in fact just received a
leg up from Colorado Democrats with a convention boost of 60% of
the delegate votes that will give him an advantageous ballot
position in his August primary challenge to Bennet.
I have now called Mr. Romanoff twice, once yesterday
afternoon and once this morning, this time on the air with Denver
talk radio host Peter Boyles. Once again, the New Media is
stepping in to do the job the Old Media won’t do, this time in
Denver. There has been no response whatsoever from
Romanoff.
There has been, however, an interesting development in the
Colorado story — regarding Governor Ritter. In a fashion typical
of the mainstream media, the Denver Post, after the
initial story last September, has effectively blacked out the
blossoming Sestak-Romanoff-White House scandal. Talk show host
Boyles urged listeners to contact the Post, which they
did. In response, the paper’s Public Affair’s editor Chuck
Murphy, responded with a statement
that perhaps unintentionally revealed Governor Ritter’s
involvement in the Romanoff episode. Murphy, in explaining the
reason for a lack of follow-up on the Romanoff story, referred to
what he called “the alleged efforts of the Obama and Ritter
administrations to dissuade Andrew Romanoff from a
primary.”
Yet in the story the Post ran back in September,
while it mentioned that Romanoff had failed to persuade Ritter to
appoint him to the then-vacant seat held by now Interior
Secretary Salazar, the story never said Ritter was involved
in any effort to have the White House offer Romanoff a
job. Now, suddenly, Murphy refers to “the
alleged efforts of the Obama and Ritter” administrations
— emphasis mine. In other words, for whatever reason Murphy is
saying the Governor was involved in the Jobsgate scandal.
With the President himself now saying personally that his
White House will have a statement on the Jobsgate issue “shortly”
and Press Secretary Gibbs saying after a constant hammering from
reporters that there was “nothing problematic,” it appears the
word “alleged” could be dropped.
But the eye-opener here is Murphy’s inclusion of the
sitting Colorado Governor in this scandal. Which leads to
another, Colorado-specific set of questions:
• Has Andrew
Romanoff, like Richard Sestak, received any phone calls from the
White House to discuss the expected statement soon-to-be issued
by the White House — as per the President at his press
conference yesterday?
• What did
Governor Ritter know — and when did he know it?
• What contact
did Governor Ritter have with the White House at any point in
this scandal — and what contact has he had with the White House
as they have prepared their statement for today?
• What contact
has there been between Governor Ritter and Andrew Romanoff on
this issue? Have they been collaborating to get their stories in
line with that of the White House?
If the White House, as expected, releases a statement on
this issue today, it will be no accident.
Just as the statement announcing the resignation of
controversial Obama White House aide Van Jones was issued on the
Sunday midnight of Labor Day Weekend, so now apparently is the
Obama White House hoping to sweep the Jobsgate scandal under the
rug by issuing a statement on the Friday of Memorial Day
weekend.
This is the oldest Washington trick in the book. They
understand full-well Americans will be distracted by family and
the first holiday of the summer.
But alas, Tuesday cometh. This story will not go away. And
neither will Sean Hannity.
