Corrupt Politician Watch

Please notify us of any errors, changed, or additions. DefendUSA is limiting the list to political crimes of federal elected officials and their associates as well as governors and their associates. Many similar lists contain crimes at the state and local level as well as sexual offenses. We have decided on this limitation, frankly because the number of Republicans convicted of sexual misconduct is so long that the list becomes unwieldy. Non-political crimes are beyond the scope of DefendUSA. DefendUSA is dedicated to uncovering and routing out corrupt politicians, not sexual predators.

Side note: The list of people under investigation is not very reliable since the information is not always public information and can change daily. The other lists are more permanent and should be more reliable.

Corruption count
Since January 1, 2000. Federal level, Governor level, elected and appointed officials, aides etc.
Convicted/Pled Guilty
--------------
Republican Governor George Ryan - 4/17/2006 racketeering and bribery - (76 people convicted)
Republican Governor Bob Taft - 8/18/2005. 5 counts failure to report gifts from Lobbyists
Republican Governor John Rowland - 12/24/2004 Bribery
Republican Governor Sonny Perdue - Campaign ethics violations
NH GOP Chair Chuck McGee - conspiricy to make harrasing phone calls to block people from voting.
Republican Aide Allen Raymond
Republican James Tobin (NE Regional Dir., Bush campaign) - 12/15/05 conspiracy to commit telephone harassment, aiding and abetting of telephone harassment
Republican Charles McGee (Executive Director of the NH Republican State Committee )
Republican Shaun Hansen. GOP Marketing aide - conspiracy to commit telephone harassment and aiding and abetting telephone harassment
Republican Aide Scott Falwell - racketeering, mail fraud and obstruction of justice
Republican Aide Alexandra Prokos - Perjury
Republican Aide Jim Ellis - 13 counts of unlawful acceptance of a corporate political contribution, money laundering
Republican Aide John Colyandro - money laundering
Republican Brian Hicks - bribery
Republican Chief of Staff Peter Ellef - Bribery
Republican Roger G. Stillwell - Interior Department official - bribed by Abramoff
Republican Lobbyist Jack Abramoff - defrauding of American Indian tribes and corruption of public officials
Republican Lobbyist and Congressional Aide (to Tom Delay) Tony Rudy - conspiricy
Republican Representative Bob Ney - Conspiricy to defraud the United States and making false statements
Republican Neil Volz (lobbyist and aide to Bob Ney) - bribery and corruption
Republican William Heaton (Bob Ney's chief of staff) - Conspiricy
Republican Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham - conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud, wire fraud, and tax evasion
Republican David Hossein Safavian. Lying, obstruction of Justice
Democratic Senator Traficant - bribery and forcing his aides to perform chores
Republican Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby - two counts of perjury, one of obstruction of justice, and one of making false statements to federal investigators
Republican Tom Noe - Laundered money for the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign, theft, corruption, party chairman and Bush Pioneer fundraiser
Republican Gov Ernie Fletcher - 13 aides indicted
Republican Micheal Scanlon (lobbyist and aide to Tom DeLay) - bribery
Deputy Secretary Steven Griles - bribery, perjury, obstrcting a congressional investigation.
Republican Congressional aide Mark Zachares - bribery
Republican deputy Interior secretary Stephen Griles - Obstruction of Justice
Republican lobbyist Italia Federici - Tax Evasion, Obstruction of Justice
Republican Lobbyist and Congressional Aide (to Tom Delay) Michael Scanlon - Conspiricy to bribe public officials
Republican Interior Department official Roger Stillwell - failure to report gifts
Republican Brent Wilkes - 13 counts of bribery (of Duke Cunningham)
Republican Mitchell Wade - bribery (of Duke Cunningham)
Republican Senator Ted Stevens -7 counts of lying to the FBI, concealing income.
Kyle "Dusty" Foggo (George W Bush's CIA Executive Director) - 30 wide-ranging counts of fraud, conspiracy. Pled guilty to accepting bribes. Charges were later dismissed due to deliberate misconduct on the part of Bush's justice department.
Todd Palin - Husband and aid of Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin (and 9 aides)
guilty of contempt in an attempt to coverup wrongdoing in the governor's office
Republican Governor Palin/Republican VP nominee - Abuse of power, failure to pay income taxes.
Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich - 17 counts of public corruption.
Republican Tom Delay - money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering
Democratic Senator William Jefferson - 11 counts of corruption
Republican Representative Mark Deli Siljander - obstruction of justice and acting as an unregistered foreign agent related to his work for an Islamic charity with ties to international terrorism.
Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel - 11 counts of violating house rules


Confessed under grant of Immunity
---------------------------------
Monica Goodling, White House liaison for Alberto Gonzales - Hired federal prosecuters based upon party affiliation.


Indicted/Charged
----------------

Republican Representative Richard George Renzi - 35 counts of Corruption, bribery, conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering, extortion, insurance fraud, conflict on interest.

Convicted: 122 Republicans. 4 Democrats
Indicted/Charged: 1 Republicans.
Confessed under grant of Immunity: 1 Republican. 0 Democrats.
Total: 124 Republicans. 4 Democrats.

Doctored Intelligence

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-curveball20nov20,1,4140621.story?coll=la-headlines-nation&ctrack=1&cset=true

How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball'
The Iraqi informant's German handlers say they had told U.S. officials that his information was 'not proven,' and were shocked when President Bush and Colin L. Powell used it in key prewar speeches.
BERLIN — The German intelligence officials responsible for one of the most important informants on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction say that the Bush administration and the CIA repeatedly exaggerated his claims during the run-up to the war in Iraq. Five senior officials from Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, said in interviews with The Times that they warned U.S. intelligence authorities that the source, an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball, never claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so.

According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons.

Curveball's German handlers for the last six years said his information was often vague, mostly secondhand and impossible to confirm. "This was not substantial evidence," said a senior German intelligence official. "We made clear we could not verify the things he said."The German authorities, speaking about the case for the first time, also said that their informant suffered from emotional and mental problems. "He is not a stable, psychologically stable guy," said a BND official who supervised the case. "He is not a completely normal person," agreed a BND analyst.

Curveball was the chief source of inaccurate prewar U.S. accusations that Baghdad had biological weapons, a commission appointed by Bush reported this year. The commission did not interview Curveball, who still insists his story was true, or the German officials who handled his case.
...
Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had "mobile biological weapons labs" designed to produce "germ warfare agents." Bush cited the mobile germ factories in at least four prewar speeches and statements, and other world leaders repeated the charge.

Powell also highlighted Curveball's "eyewitness" account when he warned the United Nations Security Council on the eve of war that Iraq's mobile labs could brew enough weapons-grade microbes "in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people."

The senior BND officer who supervised Curveball's case said he was aghast when he watched Powell misstate Curveball's claims as a justification for war.

"We were shocked," the official said. "Mein Gott! We had always told them it was not proven…. It was not hard intelligence."

----------------------------
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-niger11dec11,0,3678379.story?coll=la-home-headlines
More than a year before President Bush declared in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material in Africa, the French spy service began repeatedly warning the CIA in secret communications that there was no evidence to support the allegation.

....

It was not the first time a foreign government tried to warn U.S. officials off of dubious prewar intelligence. In the notorious "Curveball" case, an Iraqi who defected to Germany claimed to have knowledge of Iraqi biological weapons. Bush and other U.S. officials repeatedly cited Curveball's claims even as German intelligence officials argued that he was unstable and might be a fabricator.

-------------------------
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/12/AR2005051201857.html
Seven months before the invasion of Iraq, the head of British foreign intelligence reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair that President Bush wanted to topple Saddam Hussein by military action and warned that in Washington intelligence was "being fixed around the policy," according to notes of a July 23, 2002, meeting with Blair at No. 10 Downing Street.

"The case was thin," summarized the notes taken by a British national security aide at the meeting. "Saddam was not threatening his neighbours and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

------------------
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3056626.stm
The CIA warned the US Government that claims about Iraq's nuclear ambitions were not true months before President Bush used them to make his case for war, the BBC has learned.

Doubts about a claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from the African state of Niger were aired 10 months before Mr Bush included the allegation in his key State of the Union address this year, a CIA official has told the BBC.

...

But the CIA official has said that a former US diplomat had already established the claim was false in March 2002 - and that the information had been passed on to government departments, including the White House, well before Mr Bush mentioned it in the speech.

...

That means that the administration would have known nearly a year before the State of the Union address that the information was likely false.

----------------
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-05-30-wolfowitz-iraq_x.htm
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz cited bureaucratic reasons for focusing on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and said a "huge" result of the war was to enable Washington to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia.

"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason," Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in a Pentagon transcript of an interview with Vanity Fair.

...

However, the remarks were widely published in Europe and were seen by skeptical Europeans as a tacit admission that the United States overstated Iraq's weapons threat.

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