The Other Shoe

With all the noise about Jack Abramoff - I have to wonder if there will be an equal amount of noise when the other shoe drops. I have no doubt the other shoe will drop and also I have no doubt the MSM will be strangely silent about it.

Betsy reminds us that the Henry Cisneros saga is still waiting to be resolved (or is that reported?). Meanwhile I have another question to ask - does anyone out there remember David Rosen?

Rosen was a top finance aid for Hillary Clinton's bid to be elected Senator from New York. Rosen was acquitted of two counts of filing false campaign finance statements with the Federal Election Commission. Two things to remember about this case - nobody denied that laws were broken (but it was a mistake - like not seeing a stop sign) and a "secret" informant was used by the FBI to help make the case against Rosen.

To the first point - the Hillary Clinton fund raising event in question was bankrolled, organized and staged by two felons - Peter Paul and Aaron Tonken, who is currently serving a 63-month sentence on fraud charges stemming from celebrity charity fund-raisers he organized. Peter Paul was a two-time felon at the time he bankrolled the fundraiser in question and is now a three-time convicted felon who (according to this article in the New York Sun) also happens to be suing Mr. and Mrs. Clinton;

"...alleging the former president and first lady took more than $2 million in illegal donations, misreported them, and failed to follow through on a deal that involved Mr. Clinton coming to work for Paul's now-defunct Internet company, Stan Lee Media."

David Rosen may have been acquitted but I don't think this case is going away (some have said that Rosen was acquitted only because the witnesses were slimier than the defendant).

That brings us to what the Sun terms "the confidential witness (CW)".

Again using the New York Sun article as my source:

"The CW [confidential witness] is related to an extremely prominent and well-known political figure. It can be expected that the fact that CW was working in an undercover capacity for the FBI will become the subject of intense media attention," prosecutor Peter Zeidenberg wrote in a November 2004 memo asking a federal magistrate to keep the relationship under wraps.

An affidavit filed by a Los Angeles-based FBI agent, David Smith, said the informant began working with the FBI in July 2002."The CW states that s/he is active in fundraising for the Democratic Party. CW assisted in the U.S. Senate campaign of Hillary Clinton. S/he was involved in the planning of the Clinton Gala," Mr. Smith wrote in January 2003. "The CW is the target of an FBI investigation on unrelated bank fraud charges. S/he has since signed a plea agreement, and has agreed to cooperate in this case."

The FBI cannot be happy with the results of the Rosen case and I would guess have redoubled their pressure on their "confidential witness" to give them something they can use in exchange for leniency in his/her bank fraud case. Is there another shoe here?

Keep in mind that the relationships in both parties are very incestuous. It is unlikely that the CW only worked on the Clinton Gala. For example - David Rosen was involved not just in fund raising for Clinton but also with Wesley Clark and Donnie Fowler who lost out to Howard Dean for the position of Democratic National Committee chairman.

Heck - politics has become so incestuous at this point that I wouldn't be surprised if the "confidential witness" turned out to be Jack Abramoff.