The Culture of Miracles

The anti-Bush Trinity Minority Leader Harry Reid, flanked by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. (L) and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL.

Okay I admit it Republicans aren’t as smart as Democrats! I also admit that Republicans don’t know how to perform miracles and make 1.1 million dollars out of thin air like Democrat Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid does. Reid says that the Republicans live in a culture of corruption. If that is true then I say that the Democrats live in a culture of miracles. Why?

Hell, Harry can be busy, going about doing the country’s business and voilà 1 million dollars just pops up! Now that’s smart and miraculous. (Click on Culture of Miracles)

So do you have to be a United States Senator for that type of miracle or can it be accomplished by any Joe or Jane Blow citizen like me?

Were there lottery tickets involved or was it the straight kind of immaculate investments that only the influence of the well politically positioned can conjure up?

They say that Harry made this money on land that he didn’t even own! Man! Now that’s good! Seven fishes and two loaves of bread good!

But the greatest miracle is not even the money. Nope while according to Reid there is a culture of corruption in Washington D.C. this kind of miracle happens an awful lot in D.C.

The greatest miracle of all will be the slight of hand that main stream media (MSM) will play on this Reid scandal miracle. Reid’s miracle will get shuffled into the deck of cards of Foley’s emailing for gays and any Republican scandal that can be used to parry the impact of Reid’s miracle by a contrast of so-called Republican malfeasance and it will disappear right out of public view! (Poof!) But no MSM isn’t biased.

But let’s take a look at the Senate Minority Leaders miracle. The Associated Press has an exclusive report on a series of real estate transactions by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, in which he parlayed a $400,000 investment into a $1.1 million return in just six years.

The focus of the AP's report is on the fact that Reid mis-reported the transactions in his Senate financial disclosure forms. He made the original investment personally, but transferred his land to a limited liability company in 2001, without reporting that transfer, meaning that Senator Reid no longer owned the land. It was actually the LLC that sold the land in 2004, but Reid reported the transaction as if it had been a personal sale of the land he bought in 1998.

So he sold the land in 2001 without disclosing the transaction to Congress as required by Senate ethnics rules and presto chango in 2004 he reported the LLC’s sale as if it were his own. (You got it?) (Man those illusionists are good!)

Substantively, what happened is that Reid did this real estate deal with a friend named Jay Brown, a Las Vegas lawyer whom the AP describes as follows:

Jay Brown, a longtime friend and former casino lawyer whose name surfaced in a major political bribery trial this summer and in other prior organized crime investigations.

It looks like Brown did all the work and cut his friend Reid in on the deal. (for the uninitiated that’s called a kickback and those are illegal) The AP report states that the transactions were never documented. Basically, the partners bought land that was zoned for residential use, and persuaded local authorities to change the zoning to commercial, and then sold out to developers who put up a shopping center. Brown obtained the re-zoning in part by emphasizing Reid's participation in the deal.

Is there anything wrong with this? It appears that Reid clearly violated Senate ethics rules by failing to disclose the existence of the LLC and his partnership with Brown. He reported the income, but not the relationship.

Basically, Reid received a kickback of $700,000 on land that he didn’t own from a partner that he didn’t disclose in Senate disclosure forms. Because of that omission Reid’s disclosure forms prove to be fraudulently filed. By the way this business partner has known ties with organized crime. (You’re probably more interest in the Foley emails huh?)

But wait there’s more blogger Ed Morrissey writes; The AP left out a big part of this story on Harry Reid. The "developer who was benefiting from a government land swap that Reid supported" is probably Harvey Whittemore, a Nevada lobbyist with financial ties to Reid's sons and his campaigns. Morrissey wrote about this last August on his blog and in a column for the New York Post.

Reid intervened on a number of occasions for Whittemore so that he could get his hands on federal land for a massive development project. The only thing that we couldn't see was whether Reid personally gained from this transaction, because at the time, all we had was Whittemore's employment of Reid's kids and his campaign contributions.

This new story closes the loop according to Morrissey. Now we see that Reid personally profited from his interventions on Whittemore's behalf, at least indirectly, and that he took pains to cover it up. It's complicated, and it stinks wrote Morriessey.

ONE MORE THING: This story also illustrates one of the reasons why so many politicians love government regulations. The harder it is to do business without multiple government approvals, and the more regulations that hobble business transactions, the more valuable are the politician's services in helping a constituent to circumvent them. Apparently Senator Reid is good at this type of intervention.

In an attempt of misdirection meant to refute these allegations the Senator said, "Everything I did was transparent," Mr. Reid said that at a news conference Wednesday, after the story broke. "Everything is fully disclosed to the ethics committee and everyone else. As I said, if there is some technical change that the ethics committee wants, I'll be happy to do that."

Mr. Reid's professions of transparency and full disclosure are transparently wrong. His investment was not reported in a manner that made clear his partnership with Mr. Brown in addition to that Mr. Reid reported the sell of land that the did not own and when he own that land he did not report it.

Mr. Reid no longer owned the land, but instead had sold it for an interest in the Patrick Lane corporation, was not some mere "technical change," as the senator would like to brush it off. It's an essential element of financial disclosure rules, the purpose of which is to know how and with whom public officials are financially entwined.

This story is as important as the Mark Foley media blitz but alas it is destined to vanish into obscurity due to media partisanship and media’s attempt to sway voter sentiment regarding the November elections.

Can you say hocus-pocus? ….Harry Reid and the main stream media can!