The leading "corrupt" politicians of the year
The organization Judicial Watch has announced its list of the “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians” for 2007. It includes four presidential candidates -- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Huckabee.
Giuliani makes the list based, in part, on revelations that his office “billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons." However, this charge now appears to be untrue.
Huckabee makes the list because he was the subject of "14 ethics complaints and a volley of questions about his integrity, ranging from his management of campaign cash to his use of a nonprofit organization to subsidize his income to his destruction of state computer files on his way out of the governor’s office.” In response, "Huckabee sued the state ethics commission twice and attempted to shut the ethics process down." However, the specific complaints about which I have some knowledge tend to suggest poor judgment and tackiness, rather than corruption per se.
The other six public figures on the Judicial Watch list are: Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, John Conyers, Larry Craig, and Scooter Libby. How John Murtha missed out is a mystery.
Via the Weekly Standard
UPDATE: A story more potentially harmful to Huckabee is this report from The Politico that he accepted $52,000 in speaking fees from a bio-tech company that wants to research human embryonic stem cells. Again, not corrupt, but probably not good from the perspective of those, including many evangelicals, who oppose such reserach.
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