The American Spectator

Sen. Harry Reid is the most politically unethical leader in Washington. By this we mean he is willing to lie and manipulate facts and information he provides to his constituents and the American people to suit his purposes regardless of the cost.

For example: before the Christmas recess, he claimed he wasn’t playing politics with the renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act. Yet sources tell us that Reid aides and other members of the Democratic leadership staff who were coordinating with sympathetic media and third party operatives, threatened the New York Times with going public about the NSA anti-terrorism prevention program themselves if the Times did not run the story they had been sitting on for almost a year before the Act’s renewal debate was over. Reid said he had little to do with the threatened filibuster of the Act’s renewal.

Now, we have Reid calling for the resignation of Department of Homeland Security chief, Michael Chertoff. Why? Because Chertoff authorized the removal of Las Vegas from a priority list of cities at risk for terrorism. “Anyone who can’t see that Las Vegas is a high-risk area doesn’t deserve to serve in a position like that,” Reid told his local papers. Reid didn’t care enough about the lives of his constituents to reauthorize some of the most critical anti-terrorism tools our intelligence and law enforcement people use. Yet he’ll call for Chertoff’s head.

Chertoff and the Bush Administration may play politics with a lot of issues. But they don’t play politics with core national security concerns. Harry Reid and his leadership cabal (Howie Dean included) do play politics with the terrorism issue. They have endangered lives of intelligence operatives through their leaking (Reid knows who in his leadership is leaking, and he’s doing nothing about it), and they did it by delaying passage of the USA PATRIOT Act reauthorization.