Bill Clinton and his administration were the targets of a series of politically-motivated investigations (read: "witchunts") that started with a real estate venture called "Whitewater."

A few years and over $60 million in taxpayer dollars later, the GOP used government printing presses to produce "The Whitewater Report," which mentioned "Whitewater" four times and found no wrongdoing -- but had 283 sexual references.

It looks like Miers has her own shady real estate deal, and it's a not as innocent as Clinton's turned out to be:

Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers collected more than 10 times the market value for a small slice of... land in a large Superfund pollution cleanup site in Dallas where the state wanted to build a highway off-ramp.

The windfall came after a judge who received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Miers' law firm appointed a close professional associate of Miers and an outspoken property-rights activist to the three-person panel that determined how much the state should pay.

...Mediation efforts in 2003 reduced the award from $106,915 to $80,915, but Miers, who controls the family’s interest in the land, hasn’t reimbursed the state for the $26,000 difference, even after Bush appointed her to the Supreme Court.

First she "forgets" to pay her dues to the Washington, D.C. and Texas bar associations, which suspends her license, then we discover unethical financial dealings between her law firm and Bush's 1998 gubernatorial re-election campaign that she (of course) failed to report on the Senate Judiciary Committee's questionnaire -- which was sent back to her for having "inadequate" and "insufficient" answers.

Bush has traded on his family's name and connections to get everything he has; it's obvious that Miers followed suit, using the Bush family name and her connection to George W. to get her sweetheart land deal.

Just another example of the Republican Party's cronyist Culture of Corruption.

Supreme Court/Judiciary | Link | TrackBack