Guys, guys, guys: Mugabe’s radioactive. I know that his money spends as good as anybody else’s, but that’s only because he uses foreign currency for the bribes lobbying. Zimbabwe’s local currency is, in a word, useless; and there’s a reason for that.
WASHINGTON — Congressman Danny Davis is seeking legal counsel after being implicated in a lobbying scheme involving two Chicago men charged with illegally lobbying U.S. lawmakers on behalf of the regime of President Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
Representatives Danny Davis and Bobby Rush, both Democrats from the Chicago area, are believed to have been targeted by Prince Asiel Ben Israel and C. Gregory Turner as part of an illegal $3.4 million deal to lobby for Mugabe, whose government has been under U.S. sanctions since 2003. Neither lawmaker is explicitly named in the complaint, though both names have appeared in the Chicago media. The complaint filed in the Northern District of Illinois says that at least one of the two members of Congress planned to travel to Zimbabwe in 2009 to meet Mugabe, and that one of the members wrote two letters to Mugabe that year.
I will have to remember to revisit this in a year and a half, when they finally get around to indicting Danny Davis for whatever it is that the Feds find in the process of investigating him. And it’s a subtle, yet vicious, indictment of our system that I feel that I can safely predict that Davis will be indicted, he will resign… and his seat will smoothly be reassigned to whatever Democratic flunky pushes his or her way to the top of the pile.
Barring unforeseen circumstances, of course. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some organization – HINT, HINT, NRCC – that could be preparing the groundwork for, I don’t know, winning one of these seats for a change? Because one of the major reasons why parties indulge this kind of (alleged) corruption in safe seats is because those seats are safe…
Moe Lane (crosspost)
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