Having begun my career as a lobbyist under the dome of the state capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I know a thing or two about political corruption in the Keystone State and the City of Brotherly Love\u2026 I\u2019ve seen it \u201cup close and personal.\u201d\u00a0 So it came as no surprise when the Philadelphia Inquirer<\/i> published a story on March 16, detailing the results of a sting operation launched in 2010 under then-Pennsylvania attorney general, now governor, Tom Corbett.<\/p>\n
However, to fully understand the evolution of the sting operation it is necessary to begin at the very beginning.\u00a0 The central character in the sting is a man named Tyron B. Ali, age 40, an immigrant from the Caribbean island nation of Trinidad.\u00a0 Ali is the owner of a day-care center in North Philadelphia and a registered lobbyist in Harrisburg.<\/p>\n
Ali first came to the attention of law enforcement officials in April 2009 when he was arrested in connection with a $430,000 fraud.\u00a0 According to the Inquirer<\/i>, Ali was accused of submitting phony invoices and forging hundreds of bank statements, tax forms, and paychecks in a Pennsylvania program designed to aid low-income families and seniors.\u00a0 State prosecutors were also aware that, in order to circumvent statutory campaign contribution limits, Ali was found to have been lining up illegal \u201cstraw\u201d contributions for the campaign of Daniel D. McCaffery, a Democratic candidate for Philadelphia DA, now a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court judge.<\/p>\n
In that case, campaign finance records showed that four contributions of $2,500 each were made to the McCaffery campaign, all from associates of Ali.\u00a0 However, at about the same time that Ali delivered the four checks to the McCaffery campaign, McCaffery staffers learned of Ali\u2019s arrest in the unrelated fraud case.\u00a0 McCaffery\u2019s campaign manager telephoned the four donors and one admitted that the money was not his; the money was Ali\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Then, in a surprising move for a Democrat, McCaffery reported the violations to attorney general Tom Corbett, a Republican, and promptly refunded the illegal contributions.\u00a0 It was then that a top prosecutor, Frank Fina, chief of the attorney general\u2019s Public Corruption section (who earlier led the criminal investigation of Penn State assistant head football coach, Jerry Sandusky), was assigned to handle the Ali investigation.\u00a0 In the hope of receiving a more lenient outcome in his fraud indictment, Ali agreed to assist Fina\u2019s investigation into widespread official corruption by wearing a body wire.<\/p>\n
In order to keep Ali from \u201cwandering off the reservation,\u201d the attorney general assigned a 24-year veteran of the attorney general\u2019s office to serve as his driver and constant companion.\u00a0 In the eighteen month period between October 13, 2010 and April 23, 2012, Ali produced some 400 hours of audio and video recordings detailing 113 conversations with Pennsylvania political figures, Republicans and Democrats.\u00a0 And although Ali dangled inducements before a great many politicians, of both political parties, only four Democratic lawmakers and a Philadelphia traffic court judge took the bait.<\/p>\n
Rep. Louise Bishop took $1,500; Rep. Vanessa Brown took $4,000; Rep. Michelle Brownlee took $3,500; Rep. Ronald G. Waters accepted multiple gifts totaling $7,650; and Traffic Court Judge Thomasine Tynes received a Tiffany bracelet.\u00a0 All are Democrats, all are from Philadelphia (representing precincts that gave not one single vote to Mitt Romney in 2012), and all are African-Americans.<\/p>\n
According to the Inquirer<\/i>, \u201cThings were going so well that, in the summer of 2012, prosecutors considered setting Ali up in a fancy lobbying office near the Capitol.\u00a0 The plan was to rig the office with hidden cameras and expand the hunt\u2026\u201d\u00a0 However, before they could implement the plan, Pennsylvanians went to the polls and elected Democrat Kathleen Kane as attorney general.\u00a0 Within days after taking office Kane brought the investigation to an abrupt halt.<\/p>\n
Thumbing through the Democrat Party playbook, Kane found that the simplest and easiest ploy to support her brazenly partisan contempt for the rule of law would be to do what Democrats always do when they find themselves without a plausible argument: she threw down the race card.\u00a0 In a statement to the Inquirer<\/i> on Friday, March 14, Kane called the investigation \u201cpoorly conceived, badly managed, and tainted by racism,\u201d saying it had \u201ctargeted<\/i> African Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n
In truth, what motivated Kane was the need to keep Philadelphia\u2019s black voters on the Democrat political plantation.\u00a0 It just wasn\u2019t smart politics for a Democrat attorney general to prosecute four black Democrat lawmakers and a black Democrat judge for accepting bribes, even though most of their crimes were caught on audio and\/or video tape.<\/p>\n
The Inquirer<\/i> report reminded readers that, during her 2012 campaign for attorney general, Kane had been critical of what she felt was the slow pace of the Sandusky investigation at Penn State.\u00a0 Once elected, she hired a former Philadelphia federal prosecutor to investigate Fina\u2019s handling of the case.\u00a0 After a full year of investigating the investigation, Kane declared that her investigation was taking longer than she had anticipated.<\/p>\n
In Democrat-speak, that is another way of saying that it takes a lot longer to uncover Republican wrongdoing when there is no wrongdoing to be uncovered.\u00a0 But that doesn\u2019t normally stop Democrats when they\u2019re out to find dirt on Republicans.\u00a0 According to the Inquirer<\/i>, within hours after taking office, when Fina was in his last week on the job, Kane sent technicians into his office on a \u201cblack bag\u201d mission, after working hours, for the purpose of removing the hard drive from his computer… apparently in the faint hope of finding some usable tidbit of damning evidence relating to his conduct of the Sandusky case.<\/p>\n
If nothing else, the mess in Pennsylvania is a perfect example of what happens when the people elect Democrats to public office.\u00a0 Since the publication of the Inquirer<\/i> story on March 16, the Democrat Party has been hit by a long list of scandals, from New York to California, where State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco), an outspoken foe of 2nd<\/sup> Amendment gun rights, has been charged with multiple offenses, including charges relating to illegal gun trafficking.<\/p>\n But the biggest Democrat fish caught in the corruption net is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)… the most despicable Democrat in a long list of despicable Democrats.\u00a0 Reid is charged with digging into his campaign chest to give his granddaughter, Ryan Elizabeth Reid, a gift of $17,000, even though she is an aspiring actress in New York and did no useful work for the Reid campaign.\u00a0 Several members of Congress have gone to prison for committing similar crimes.\u00a0 It remains to be seen how \u201cDingy Harry\u201d manages to slither out of this predicament.<\/p>\n This is not to say that there is not an occasional rotten apple in the Republican barrel, but in all my years as a lobbyist and as a political operative I have found very few Republicans who\u2019ve demonstrated the sort of moral and ethical lapses that we regularly see among Democrats.\u00a0 During my years in the political arena I can recall only two instances in which I was solicited for a bribe.\u00a0 The first was a member of the Kentucky State Senate and the second was a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.\u00a0 Both were Democrats.\u00a0 My immediate response in both instances was, \u201cI\u2019m sorry, but we just don\u2019t work that way.\u201d<\/p>\n I have long felt that it is impossible to be elected to public office as a Democrat without first making a deal with the devil.\u00a0 And while there exists a single common thread of ideology that binds all Republicans… of all ages, races, creeds, professions, and economic status… the same is not true of Democrats.\u00a0 The Democrat Party is a coalition of special interests, each of which demand something specific, and quite different, from government.<\/p>\n For example, when a Democrat candidate appears before a black audience, his\/her stance on quality education must be vastly different from the message he\/she delivers before an audience of unionized public school teachers.\u00a0 And when that same politician campaigns before a group of radical environmentalists, his\/her message on issues such as the Keystone XL pipeline must be vastly different from the message he\/she would deliver before a roomful of blue collar workers.<\/p>\n In order to be successful as a Democratic candidate it is absolutely essential to have a separate position on all of the major issues for each of the party\u2019s many constituencies, and to remember without fail which lies you\u2019ve told to each of them.\u00a0 It is such a flexible moral compass… standard equipment for all Democrats… that made it possible for all those members of the Pennsylvania Black Caucus to succumb so easily to Mr. Ali\u2019s proffered goodies.<\/p>\n But all is not lost; the Pennsylvania bribery sting may yet have a silver lining.\u00a0 It is possible that the greatest beneficiary of the Black Caucus political scandal will be Republican governor Tom Corbett.\u00a0 As matters now stand, Corbett\u2019s approval rating is somewhere in the mid-30s and his reelection chances appear to be in a bit of trouble.\u00a0 But when the Democrats choose a candidate from among seven candidates running in the May primary, that candidate will be called upon to defend attorney General Kane and the bribe takers of the Black Caucus.\u00a0 Yes, the fish does rot from the head and it\u2019s clear that Barack Obama\u2019s Chicago-style politics has infected Democrats all across the country… just in time to backfire on the Democrat Party and its candidates in\u00a0 November.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Having begun my career as a lobbyist under the dome of the state capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I know a thing or two about political corruption in the Keystone State and the City of Brotherly Love\u2026 I\u2019ve seen it \u201cup … Continue reading