The new White House jobs program just keeps getting worse. WH mouthpiece Robert Gibbs insists the Obama administration did nothing illegal, then goes on to admit Jim Messina offered Andrew Romanoff 3 jobs to get out of the race against Michael Bennet.
In a statement released early this morning, WH Press Sec. Robert Gibbs said the WH had done nothing wrong. "Andrew Romanoff applied for a position at USAID during the Presidential transition. He filed this application through the Transition on-line process. After the new administration took office, he followed up by phone with White House personnel," Gibbs said. "Jim Messina called and emailed Romanoff last September to see if he was still interested in a position at USAID, or if, as had been reported, he was running for the US Senate. ... Messina wanted to determine if it was possible to avoid a costly battle between two supporters."
As Ed Morrissey points out,
Er, isn’t that exactly the problem? If the White House has been offering people paid jobs in the administration in order to “avoid costly battles” in primaries, then that breaks the law. The allegations surrounding their dealings with Joe Sestak and Romanoff have been all along that the White House attempted to buy off primary challengers to Democratic incumbents in Senate races. Far from establishing that there has been no wrongdoing, the statement confirms the allegations.
As Ed then notes, the chances of prosecution here are minimal, but it does expose the Obama administration as a corrupt political machine, and that flies in the face of his "I'm a new kind of politician" meme. Friends are telling me that "everybody does it," and that a Bush administration official said so. I guess that argument is supposed to make it ok to break the law, but I've never understood how, precisely. I mean, we still have murders, so should we get rid of laws against it? It's a stupid argument brought up by desperate Obama-lovers, and it's going to tar all Democrats. This White House isn't just corrupt. It's incompetent.
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