Chertoff stonewalling Waxman on procurements

US: Security for Sale
The Department of Homeland Security has a section on its Web site labeled “Open for Business.” It certainly is.

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By the time DHS opened its doors in 2003, Buchholtz had returned to Blank Rome, taking Holman and Davis with him. All three quickly turned to lobbying the department whose creation they had helped to oversee. When Blank Rome signed up 18 companies as new homeland security clients that year, and added homeland security to its lobbying duties for half a dozen existing clients, no ethics rules barred Buchholtz, Holman, and Davis from lobbying the new department -- because technically, none of them had worked there. Blank Rome had just merged with Dyer Ellis & Joseph, a firm that employed several former Capitol Hill aides with ties to influential members of Congress and expertise in maritime and transportation issues -- important knowledge because DHS had absorbed the Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which are now the top dispensers of procurement dollars in the DHS.

The Philadelphia-based law firm formally launched a separate lobbying arm in Washington, Blank Rome Government Relations, which included the three former White House staffers and the Dyer Ellis principals. Later that year, the firm also brought on Barbara Comstock, a former congressional staffer who had served as the chief spokesperson for then-Attorney General John Ashcroft -- after becoming notorious as the head of the opposition research team at the Republican National Committee (RNC) in 2000; The Washington Post dubbed her a “one-woman wrecking crew.” Since joining Blank Rome, Comstock also has led a public relations campaign on behalf of Tom DeLay and is spokeswoman for former Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s legal defense fund.

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Indeed, Chertoff has shown little enthusiasm for transparency, even concerning problems that predated his arrival. When he appeared at a hearing of the House Committee on Government Reform last June, Democratic Representative Henry Waxman complained that his requests for basic information about the contracts awarded to Blank Rome’s clients by DHS had been ignored for five months. Although Chertoff publicly promised that the department would release the documents requested by Waxman, the congressman’s office said that as of December, DHS had still not fully responded, and had redacted portions of the Blank Rome documents provided to his investigators.

Secrecy allows abuses to flourish -- and despite the ongoing uproar over crooked lobbying and corrupt contracting, that remains business as usual in the Bush administration.



http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12920