WND EXCLUSIVE
THE TOP 10-MOST CORRUPT POLITICIANS
2013 collection of Washington malefactors is rogues' gallery
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President Obama leads the “Top Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians” for 2013, named by the Washington watchdog Judicial Watch.
This year the “honor” is for acting “as a one-man Congress, rewriting entire sections of federal law on his own.”
Judicial Watch annually releases a list of the top politicians who misbehave while purportedly representing taxpayers in Washington. The 2013 “honors” go to, in alphabetical order, House Speaker John Boehner, CIA Director John Brennan, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Eric Holder, former IRS commissioner Steve T. Miller and former IRS official Lois Lerner, ex-DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, Obama, Sen. Harry Reid and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
Several are perennial selections, including Obama, who has been on the list for seven years already, and Holder.
Obama, the organization contends, “is a master at catch-me-if-you can, corrupt politics.”
“Not only is his administration secretive and dishonest; its callous disregard for the rule of law undermines our constitutional republic,” the report said.
“Perhaps Obama’s most outrageous actions over the past year were his continual lies about the ability of Americans to keep their own health insurance under Obamacare. According the Free Beacon, Obama misled the American people a total of 36 times between 2008 and 2013 with his promise, ‘If you like your health insurance, you can keep it.’ And according to NBC News, Obama knew, even as he repeated his lie, that ‘more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.’
“According to the Galen Institute, Obama has now unilaterally rewritten the Obamacare law as passed by Congress 14 times by executive fiat, with the majority of those changes coming in 2013. Those changes include such major overhauls as the congressional opt-out, eviscerating the individual mandate, and delaying the employer mandate. The latest Obama fix came on December 20, when he suddenly moved to allow hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their insurance due to Obamacare to sign up for bare-bone ‘catastrophic’ plans,” it said.
The list also said that throughout 2013, the Obama family “continued to use the White House as its own personal travel bureau and the taxpayers as their personal expense account.”
While Obama, the report said, “quickly disavowed any knowledge of the IRS assault on tea party and other conservative groups leading up to the 2012 presidential election, the fact is that it was the president himself who fingered the groups for what might be called ‘special handling.’”
Obama had blasted conservative groups with attacks such as “We don’t know who’s behind these ads and we don’t know who’s paying for them,” “You don’t know if it’s a foreign controlled corporation” and “The only people who don’t want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide.”
Boehner
Judicial Watch charged that House Speaker John Boehner has become a master at what Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer calls the “Tollbooth Strategy.”
That’s when donations are accepted to move legislation down the road toward law, the report explained.
Among the actions cited were the Wireless Tax Fairness Act, which was brought up for a vote the day after Boehner’s campaign collected “33 checks from wireless industry executives, totaling almost $40,000.”
Brennan
Judicial Watch cites Brennan’s decision to reveal the extent of U.S. penetration into al-Qaida, which forced a successful spy operation to be shut down. He also apparently orchestrated the administration’s attempt to influence the storyline of the movie “Zero Dark Thirty.”
Chambliss
The Georgia Republican was cited because the New York Times reported his abuses of loopholes through which campaign cash was converted into a lavish lifestyle.
The expenses included $10,000 on golf at Pebble Beach, nearly $27,000 at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and $107,752 at the exclusive Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Fla., the report said.
Clinton
Judicial Watch said Hillary Clinton’s downfall was Benghazi.
“On Jan. 23, 2013, outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified to congressional committees regarding the terrorist attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, which led to the murder of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other American citizens. At times evasive, at other times defensive and aggressive, Clinton delivered her version of events in the days before and after the murders in Benghazi. And, in the end, the Secretary of State pretended to take ‘responsibility,’ but gave a predictable response regarding who is to blame: ‘…the level of responsibility for the failures…was set at the Assistant Secretary of State level and below,’ Clinton said, referring to an investigation of the incident. In other words, this was not my fault,” Judicial Watch reported.
Holder
He’s a “regular” on the list, Judicial Watch said.
“In May 2013, Holder may well have committed perjury when he was involved in a back-and-forth with Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., about whether the Department of Justice (DOJ) could prosecute reporters under the Espionage Act for publishing classified material. In response to Johnson’s interrogatories Holder made the following statement: “In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material – this is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.”
However, Holder previously had approved a search warrant for the email account and phone records of Fox News reporter James Rosen, Judicial Watch said.
Miller and Lerner
The trouble for Miller and Lerner was that the IRS admitted to targeting anti-Obama tea party organizations and other conservatives during the 2012 election. The IRS “purposely stonewalled the approval of nonprofit applications from ‘tea party’ and other conservative groups that were seeking tax exempt status.”
“According to a report by the agency’s inspector general released in May 2013, for more than 18 months beginning in early 2010: ‘The IRS used inappropriate criteria that identified for review tea party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions instead of indications of potential political campaign intervention.’”
Lerner headed the department that was involved.
Napolitano
Judicial Watch explained she “played a major role in doing an end-run around existing immigration law by helping President Obama implement his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) directive in lieu of DREAM Act passage.”
Sebelius
“The Obama administration’s own lawyers determined Sebelius could be fired for violating federal law when reports surfaced that she had campaigned for Obama while acting in her official capacity as an executive branch official during the last presidential campaign. This made Kathleen Sebelius the first member ever of a president’s cabinet to be found guilty of violating the Hatch Act,” Judicial Watch said, among other issues.
Dishonorable mentions went to former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, outgoing Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and incoming Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, former Rep. Rick Renzi, R-Ariz., and National Security Adviser Susan Rice.
Last year’s list included Obama, GOP Rep. Vern Buchanan, Holder, Clinton, Rice, Steven Chu, Illinois Democrat Jesse Jackson Jr., New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, Reid, Florida Republican David Rivera and Sebelius.
The entire 2011 list: Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala.; former Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev.; Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla.; Holder; Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill.; Obama; Rep. Laura Richardson, D-Calif.; Rep. David Rivera, R-Fla.; Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif.; and Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/01/obama-tops-corrupt-list-for-acting-as-a-1-man-congress/#hZ2cJV863TE8R7Z4.99
