Originally Posted By Darkbeer How about a couple more examples... <a href="http://ktla.trb.com/news/la-me-perry9dec09" target="_blank">http://ktla.trb.com/news/la-me -perry9dec09</a>,0,2319820.story?coll=ktla-news-1 >>Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry and her estranged husband owe more than a quarter of a million dollars in back federal and state income taxes, largely stemming from what they say were problems in his former law practice. Their back taxes, which totaled nearly $375,000 in 2002 but have since been paid down to $270,000, have never been publicly discussed but are documented in a legal separation lawsuit she filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court and in tax liens issued by the state and federal governments. Her husband, Douglas Galanter, has recently taken responsibility for paying the remaining debt and said Perry had no role in the failure to make tax payments. The liens show the couple's debts grew as they failed to fully pay their income taxes every year from 1989 to 2001, when Perry was first elected to the City Council. No liens have been recorded against Perry for subsequent tax years. Perry and Galanter declined to answer questions but issued statements about the back taxes. "Before I became a member of the City Council in 2001," Perry said, "my family experienced financial challenges resulting from my husband's business, and we are dealing with those issues proactively." She said that, "as an elected public official, I understand that many details of my financial affairs are in fact quite public. Other aspects of my family's finances are part of a private divorce proceeding…. For that reason, I do not feel it is appropriate for me to comment in detail on highly personal and painful matters."<< >>"I am a public official, a city of Los Angeles councilwoman," she wrote. "Other than this legal separation action, I have an unblemished record…. I do not wish my private life to be available to the public and possibly used against me when and if I choose to run for reelection." Levanas ordered the file sealed, apparently after hearing other evidence that Perry was dealing with an aggrieved constituent who was stalking her. The city, on Perry's behalf, obtained a restraining order. The order has since expired. However, the sealing order was apparently not implemented by the court clerk's office, and the file remained publicly available. During the years in which the couple did not pay their full taxes, they filed joint tax returns. Perry worked as an aide to various elected officials, including other council members, and her employer, the city of Los Angeles, routinely deducted tax money from her paychecks. As a lawyer in private practice, Galanter earned more than Perry did and would have been responsible for his own tax payments. By 2003, Perry said in court, her husband was earning $250,000 a year. Last year, Perry earned $150,000 as a member of the City Council and $10,500 as a representative of 25 cities on the board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District. << >>The couple were then trying to avoid foreclosure on the four-bedroom, four-bathroom, 3,400-square-foot home near Olympic Boulevard and Highland Avenue they had purchased in 1990 for $825,000, records show. The year before the bankruptcy filing, Perry had successfully sought to have the city declare the 1927 Mediterraneanstyle home a historic-cultural monument — a little-known designation that typically leads to a reduced property tax bill. She and her husband owed $35,000 in back property taxes on the house, which they paid when they sold it at a loss in 2001, a few months after she was elected to the City Council.<< And how about Alcee Hastings, who Nancy Pelosi was considering to be the chairperson of the Intelligence Committee... <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZjhiODMwNDA0ZGEwMGI3ZGExOGFjYmIzNzQzZjhjYjc=" target="_blank">http://article.nationalreview. com/?q=ZjhiODMwNDA0ZGEwMGI3ZGExOGFjYmIzNzQzZjhjYjc=</a> >>Eighteen years ago, Democratic Rep. John Conyers came to believe that Alcee Hastings, at the time a federal judge in Florida, was guilty of impeachable offenses. Hastings stood accused of conspiring to take bribes, and, although it is little remembered today, Conyers served as the chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee that investigated Hastings and unanimously recommended his impeachment. After the House voted 413 to 3 to impeach Hastings, Conyers went on to serve as one of the House impeachment managers who successfully argued before the Senate that Hastings should be convicted and removed from office. Conyers was also the author of perhaps the most dramatic words to come from the entire impeachment saga. In the summer of 1988, after he had played a key role in drawing up the articles of impeachment, Conyers made a speech before the House in which suggested that some of the allegations against Hastings, the first black to serve on the federal bench in Florida, might have been racially motivated. But as troubling as he found that possibility, Conyers said those concerns did not change the facts of the case. And the facts pointed to Hastings’s guilt. In the speech, Conyers looked back to civil-rights days, when corrupt judges sometimes twisted and ignored the law. “We did not wage that civil rights struggle merely to replace one form of judicial corruption for another,†Conyers said. “The principle of equality requires that a black public official be held to the same standard that other public officials are held to.…Just as race should never disqualify a person from office, race should never insulate a person from the consequences of wrongful conduct.†Conyers’s argument won the day, and Hastings was removed from the bench. But that, of course, was not the end of Hastings’s public life. (The terms of his conviction did not bar him from holding a future public office.) In 1992, Hastings won a seat in the House from Florida’s 23rd District, which he still represents today. But he did not leave his past behind; today he, and the impeachment proceedings against him, are again in the news. After a feud between Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi and California Rep. Jane Harman knocked Harman out of the running to be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Hastings now stands in line to take charge. But complicating that is what investigators like John Conyers — who now is in line to chair the House Judiciary Committee — learned about Hastings back in the 1980s. Soon House Democrats will have to take a close look at the evidence in the Hastings case and decide whether a man judged unfit for the federal bench is qualified to hold one of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government. This is what they’ll find. << Much more at the link......
Originally Posted By alexbook I'm always amazed that people like Alcee Hastings and William Jefferson get elected and re-elected. The only thing I can figure is that loyalty to a neighbor trumps common sense. I'm reminded of something that was sometimes said of Willie Brown when he was Mayor of San Francisco: "He may be a crook, but he's *our* crook."
