Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (25 page)

Asked to explain her track-covering actions, the savvy career lawyer Browner played dumb. Figuratively batting her eyelashes, she claimed she had no clue about a court injunction signed by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth on the same day she commanded an underling to wipe her hard drives clean. Golly gee willikers, how could that have slipped by her?

According to testimony in a freedom of information lawsuit filed against EPA by the Landmark Legal Foundation, a Virginia-based conservative legal watchdog group, Browner commanded a computer technician on January 19, 2001: “I would like my files deleted. I want you to delete my files.”
⁹
Not coincidentally, the Landmark Legal Foundation had been pressing Browner to fully and publicly disclose the names of any special interest groups that might have influenced her wave of last-minute regulatory actions. Two days before she told her technician to purge all her records, EPA had gone to court to file a motion opposing the federal court injunction protecting those government documents.

Plausible deniability? Not bloody likely.

Incredibly, Browner asserted that there was no work-related material on her work computer. She explained she was merely cleaning the hard drive of computer games she had downloaded for her son, and that she wanted to expunge the hard drive as a “courtesy” to the incoming Bush administration. How thoughtful.
¹⁰

Later, her agency admitted that three other top EPA officials had their computers erased despite the federal court order and ongoing Freedom of Information Act case. (The record is silent on whether Browner’s son was playing games on their desktops, too.) A further belated admission revealed that the agency had failed to search Browner’s office for public documents as required by Landmark’s public disclosure lawsuit.
¹¹

Not only were all the top officials’ hard drives cleared and reformatted, but e-mail backup tapes were erased and reused in violation of records preservation practices.
¹²

After a two-year legal battle, Judge Lamberth finally held the EPA in contempt of court for the systemic file destruction—actions Lamberth lambasted as “contumacious conduct.”
¹³
As is typical in Washington, Browner weaseled out of any serious repercussions. Lamberth inexplicably decided that slapping the agency as a whole with contempt—rather than any individual—would deter future cover-ups.

Browner has crossed the line and violated public trust before in her capacity as eco-chief. Early in her first term as EPA head, Browner got caught by a congressional subcommittee using taxpayer funds to create and send out illegal lobbying material to over 100 grassroots environmental lobbying organizations. Browner exploited her office to orchestrate a political campaign by left-wing groups, who turned around and attacked Republican lawmakers for supporting regulatory reform.
¹⁴
These are the very same groups—anti-business, anti-sound science, pro-ecohysteria—that Browner will be working with arm in arm as Obama’s “energy czar.” A bipartisan subcommittee of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee reprimanded Browner, concluding: “The concerted EPA actions appear to fit the definition of prohibited grass-roots lobbying.... The prima facie case is strong that some EPA officials may have violated the criminal law.”
¹⁵

Manhattan Institute scholar Max Schulz also points out that Browner “was the driving force behind the federal government’s effort to force General Electric Co. to spend $490 million to dredge New York’s Hudson River to rid it of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that—because they were buried under layers of silt—posed no environmental harm.” Some of her employees, Schulz recalled, “wound up facing criminal charges for falsifying evidence and manipulating lab results.”
¹⁶

Then there’s Browner’s husband, Tom Downey. While Team Obama pays lip service to breaking old Washington lobbying habits, Browner and Downey represent the prototypical influence-peddling power couple. In 2006, the pair teamed up on behalf of infamous Dubai Ports World—the United Arab Emirate-owned company that unsuccessfully sought to take over operations of six major U.S. ports. Browner was a principal in the “international consulting firm” of her old Clinton pal, and former secretary of state, Madeline Albright. Browner and Downey, whose own firm lobbied for Dubai Ports World, met with New York Senator Charles Schumer to try and quell congressional opposition. All deny that lobbying took place. It was “for informational purposes,” an Albright Group spokeswoman told the
Wall Street Journal
.
¹⁷
Yet Downey was named by
Washingtonian
magazine as one of Washington’s top 50 lobbyists. His clients have included foreign governments, drug and insurance companies, and major energy companies including Chevron and the Standard Renewable Energy Group, which will no doubt come under the regulatory purview of his broadly-empowered “energy czar” wife. Obama’s stringent lobbying rules do not apply to spouses. The White House blithely claims that “administration officials will recuse themselves from any issue involving a spouse,”
¹⁸
but how exactly can Browner recuse herself from the very core duties of her job, which include targeting carbon emissions, enacting onerous global warming reduction policies, and regulating the very industry her husband represented for years?
¹⁹

This is particularly troubling given Browner’s husband’s past. Conflict of interest and abuse of power seem to be Downey’s specialty. He was a Democrat congressman in New York for nearly two decades before losing his seat during the House banking scandal. Downey racked up overdrafts on 151 checks worth $83,000 at the House bank while his wife held a patronage job as an auditor in the House office that ran the House bank.
²⁰
An undercover ABC News investigation in 1990 showed him lolling on a beach during a congressional junket to Barbados. Reflecting on Downey’s defeat in 1992 and the loss of his long-ago image as an upstart reformer, one of Downey’s congressional colleagues told the
New York Times
: “You live in Washington, you just get sucked into Washington.”
²¹

Thanks to Barack Obama, two more old crony players have been sucked back into the Beltway swamp to wield their joint power and influence.

ADOLFO CARRIÓN : ETHICALLY STAINED URBAN CZAR

Former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión Jr. is a man in Barack Obama’s own image: Son of immigrants. Check. Young. Check. Charismatic. Check. Ambitious. Check. Oh, and embroiled in pay-for-play scandals that would make convicted Obama crony developer Tony Rezko and the Chicago political machine proud. Checkity-check-check. A perfect fit for the Obama administration.

As with energy czar Carol Browner, the Obama White House circumvented the normal confirmation process for Carrión by creating a new executive position and office for him: head of the White House Office of Urban Affairs. Voilà: urban czar! But doesn’t the president already have a Secretary of Housing and Urban Development? Why, yes. Yes, he does. That spot went to Harvard grad and former Clinton HUD official Shaun Donovan, who moved up from his role as New York City commissioner of housing and development. Grievance groups, however, were miffed that the HUD job didn’t go to a racial or ethnic minority. (Donovan is white; HUD is a notorious bastion of cronyism of color.)

Enter Carrión.

The Puerto Rican Democrat initially supported Hillary Clinton in the presidential primaries, but threw his whole being into campaigning for Obama after Clinton bowed out. As a reward for turning out the Latino vote, Obama handed him the keys to the urban czar’s office—where he will have the power to shower federal dollars on urban areas and “coordinate urban policy in traditional areas such as education, health care and public safety,” as he described the position to the
Washington Post
.
²²
The budget and staffing for the office are unknown. According to the executive order establishing the office, Carrión’s purview is sweeping. His mission:

• to provide leadership for and coordinate the development of the policy agenda for urban America across executive departments and agencies;

• to coordinate all aspects of urban policy;

• to work with executive departments and agencies to ensure that appropriate consideration is given by such departments and agencies to the potential impact of their actions on urban areas;

• to work with executive departments and agencies, including the Office of Management and Budget, to ensure that Federal Government dollars targeted to urban areas are effectively spent on the highest-impact programs; and

• to engage in outreach and work closely with State and local officials, with nonprofit organizations, and with the private sector, both in seeking input regarding the development of a comprehensive urban policy and in ensuring that the implementation of Federal programs advances the objectives of that policy.
²³

In practice, the job empowers Carrión to carry out the pay-to-play schemes that sullied his tenure in the Bronx on a nationwide scale. It’s Obama-approved old school patronage dressed up as the new, new urban renewal.

The
New York Daily News
did the work the Obama vetters failed to do and spearheaded the investigation into Carrión’s cash-and-carry arrangements with a slew of Big Apple developers. The Bronx “beep,” as borough presidents are known, took tens of thousands of dollars in donations from the real estate firms just before and after the developers snagged lucrative deals or crucial zoning changes for their projects. In turn, he made millions in public tax dollars available to his cronies. Most of the contributions, the
Daily News
reported, were “organized and well-timed.”
²⁴
The quid pro quos couldn’t be more obvious. One developer, Jonathan Coren, was gunning for a deal to build 166 units of affordable housing in the Parkchester neighborhood. He did something he had never done before in order to grease the wheels: Coren registered as a fund-raiser for Carrión.

Three weeks after Coren drummed up more than $2,500 from multiple contributors, Carrión green-lighted his project. The
Daily News
added that on another single day he raised an additional $1,255 for Carrión—less than a month before the Planning Commission, which includes a Carrión appointee, approved the deal. Next, Coren raised $6,532 for Carrión from forty-three donors: “Asked about the purpose of fund-raising for Carrión just before he reviewed the project, Coren replied, ‘None, other than, to be perfectly honest with you, at that time I became aware of his campaign. It is what it is.’”
²⁵

“It is what it is.” And there was plenty more where that came from.

Two of the largest Carrión donors were Atlantic Development Group and Latino-themed Boricua College. The developer sought approval, regulatory changes, and funding for a public project to construct housing and a college tower called Boricua Village. Atlantic and Boricua chipped in nearly $70,000 to Carrión’s campaign coffers as they negotiated the deal. Eight donations from college officials totaling $8,750 arrived for Carrión one spring day in 2006—not long after the first application for the construction project had been filed. More would follow. For their share, Atlantic’s employees contributed a total of $52,400, the largest single source of Carrión campaign money, the
Daily News
reported.
²⁶

Another firm that paid to play: BTM Development Partners. The developers sought a critical zoning change for a project that had raised community ire over traffic and other complications. BTM executives started dashing off $1,000 checks to Carrión. Not long after, they announced plans for a hotel-retail complex, and just a few months later, Carrión and Bronx officials approved the zoning changes necessary. Payoffs pay.

Carrión went even further by bringing his cash-and-carry deal to his front doorstep—literally. In 2006, he hired an architect to renovate his City Island Victorian home. The architect was Hugo Subotovsky, who just happened to be seeking approval for a number of development projects in Carrión’s realm. Once again, the
Daily News
broke the details. Once again, the Obama administration shrugged.

Over two years, the paper reported, Carrión rubber-stamped three separate Subotovsky housing projects, including the Boricua Village plan. Carrión delivered $3 million in taxpayer funds to one of the developments in May 2008. During the time period that he approved the deals, Carrión failed to pay Subotovsky for the renovation work on his home, which included the addition of a porch and balcony at a reported cost of about $36,000, including $3,627.50 in architectural fees. It is illegal for an elected official to accept home improvement renovations as a gift from an architect seeking business from the city. Carrión claimed in March 2009 that he hadn’t paid the bills because he was waiting for a “final survey” that had not yet been filed with the city. The work was finished in early 2007.
²⁷

Similar arrangements involving home renovation freebies from corporate suitors resulted in multiple criminal convictions for entrenched Alaska GOP Senator Ted Stevens and forced the resignation of Republican former Connecticut Governor John Rowland. But there was barely a peep from the Beltway’s clean government types about Carrión’s smelly deals. On March 11, 2009, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about the growing scandal. Gibbs glibly brushed it off:

Question: Robert, two things. What’s the concern from the White House about Adolfo Carrión—this current controversy about him, this possible conflict of interest?