Can anyone remember another series of elections in which the winners found themselves in so much ethical hot water so quickly? First we have a U.S. Senate convention nominee in Connecticut (Blumenthal wasn’t really elected, just chosen by delegates) revealed having misrepresented his military record multiple times. Then the victorious Republican Senate nominee in Kentucky goes on TV and radio to prove that he cares more about being true to what the New York Times calls “textbook libertarianism” than its real world human and societal costs. Now Rep. Joe Sestak is being caught in an ethical quandary. Is he going to finger members of Obama’s White House, cover up a Federal crime, or admit he was lying?
Sestak, as Ethics Alarms discussed several weeks back, told a radio interviewer that the Obama White House had tried to pave Sen. Arlen Specter’s way to re-nomination by promising Sestak a plumb appointment in exchange for withdrawing from the Democratic Senate primary in Pennsylvania. The problem is that such an offer is illegal, and G.O.P. Congressman Darrell Issa of California is (appropriately, but also opportunistically) prepared to make it an ethics test for the would-be Senator. He’s demanding the names of the White House staff members who relayed the offer to Sestak. After all, the Bush White House was tied up in knots for more than a year over the question of who revealed Valerie Plame’s C.I.A. status to the press. An Obama White House conspiracy to bribe a Congressman is at least as significant.
“If Congressman Sestak will not tell us, then to be honest the only choice we have is to deal with this from a standpoint of congressional integrity,” Issa told The Washington Examiner. “Under our ethics rules, either Congressman Sestak is lying, which would be an ethical violation, or he is covering up three felonies by members of the administration, which of course would be an ethical violation.”
Issa’s playing politics, of course, but that doesn’t mean that he’s not right on the law and on the ethics. Sestak has some difficult choices to make, though the ethical course is clear. He needs to report who tried to get him to drop out, or admit he was lying in the radio interview.
If he chooses the latter, maybe he can run for Senator from Connecticut.
Ethics Alarms 
….maybe he “mis-spoke”
p.s. This was my attempt at a sarcastic inside joke.
Sestak is really caught in a quandary, isn’t he? He had admitted early on that he’d been offered an (unspecified) job in the administration on the condition for dropping out of the primary against Senator Specter… who had been supported by Obama in his re-election quest. That he refused is to his credit. However, once this was made public, it became a question of political criminality on the part of the head of his own party… Obama himself. Therefore- and in one interview after another- Sestak has refused to offer any details of the proposal… in the obvious hope that it’ll go away.
But it’s not going away. Even the normally supportive members of the press are closely following the story and, for the sake of their own, already shakey credibility, are constrained to do so. The only question here is… who’s going to take the fall? Emmanuel? Axelrod? Someone’s going to have to do a Webster Hubbell (i.e. “fall on his sword”) in order to protect The Boss. But will it be enough? And will Sestak eventually have to come clean first in order to escape prosecution himself… much less sacrifice his senatorial hopes?
If it’s a crime, it’s a really stupid one. As several have pointed out, there’s nothing illegal about offering Sestak a job, and if he accepted it, he couldn’t run anyway, by law. It’s only a crime if the job offer is phrased as an explicit quid pro quo, which is unnecessary. Why would Obama officials be that dumb? It could well be that Sestak is the one who was embellishing, and interpreted what wasn’t explicitly illegal as intended as a bribe, in which case, he’s the one in trouble.
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