Justin Lamar Sternad has admitted to the FBI what was obvious all along – that he was indeed a fake candidate put up by Rep. David Rivera with seed money to take down his Democratic challenger, Joe Garcia.

If you want to understand how things get done in Washington, perhaps the best lesson of the year comes from the State Department’s decision late Friday to remove the Iranian exile group Mujahideen-e-Khalq from the official list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. The MEK never really lessened the activities that got it listed as a Foreign [...]

I’ve mentioned the saga of Rep. David Rivera once before. He’s the South Florida Republican Congressman who paid for mailers for a fake Democratic “candidate” in the hopes that he could either drive up the negatives or defeat his likely opponent, Joe Garcia. Investigators, including the FBI, have already discovered a bounty of evidence showing [...]

My initial post of the day concerned organizing around debt resistance as the connective tissue for a new project out of the Occupy Wall Street movement. When you read about this example of corruption around debt, you understand why organizing against it is such a vital project. The letters are sent by the thousands to [...]

They must be clearing out filing cabinets at the Department of Justice. After ending their investigation into the deaths of detainees in CIA custody, they then wrapped up a separate investigation into Joe Arpaio, the Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff suspected of various criminal acts. This particular closed investigation looked at retaliation against political foes: “After [...]

Here’s a pretty incredible story out of South Florida. David Rivera, a Congressman who already has an impressive history of corruption, paid the bills for a fake Democratic primary candidate for his House seat. Fueled with $43,000 in secret money, Republican Rep. David Rivera helped run a shadow campaign that might have broken federal laws [...]

A couple wayward House Republicans have walked off the reservation and rejected the ideological purity demanded by the party’s conservative base. Rep. Richard Hanna, elected in 2010 as part of the Republican takeover of Congress, lashed out at his caucus yesterday: U.S. Rep. Richard Hanna took his own party to task today, saying the Republican [...]

Because the Treasury Department needed another headache, a series of FOIA requests show that individual employees engaged in a series of unethical activities: Treasury Department officials have been cited for soliciting prostitutes, breaking conflict-of-interest rules and accepting gifts from corporate executives, according to the findings of official government investigations. The revelations of unethical behavior at [...]

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Darrell Issa’s perch, has released a new report on the practice of now-defunct mortgage lender Countrywide handing out special mortgages at low rates to members of Congress and other key officials through their “VIP” program. And it does not appear to pick sides or divvy up the information [...]

In a way, the idea that the Supreme Court would overturn their landmark ruling in the Citizens United case, in just two years’ time, with the same personnel on the Court based on a state Supreme Court holding in Montana, of all places, was pretty fanciful. And the Court did not surprise anyone. They quickly [...]

John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee for President and an endorser of Mitt Romney, has launched a broadside against Romney’s new patron, Sheldon Adelson, alleging that Adelson is using foreign money for his SuperPAC donations to help Republicans win the White House in 2012. “Much of Mr. Adelson’s casino profits that go to him come [...]