January 17, 2005

Melanie Sloan's Team of Watch Dogs Is Taking the Crooks To Court

We filed suit against the Justice Department... The Justice Department has documents that were stolen from the computers of Democrats, but didn't call Democratic Senators to inform them that, hey, somebody's obviously been accessing your documents, because we have them. And the question is, why didn't the Justice Department return them? I think the Justice Department is going to have a hell of a time in court with that argument.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

The mood among progressives as we gear up for George W. Bush’s coronation is to keep fighting this administration's all-out assault on democracy. But progressives must learn that it's best not to fight alone, but to connect with and support fellow patriots and organizations that are willing to punch back. One such tough-as-nails organization that won't lie down but has gone on the offensive against corrupt members of the Bush administration is "CREW," or Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, with its savvy Executive Director Melanie Sloan. BuzzFlash readers and progressives need to know about this dynamic organization.

After it was reported that conservative pundit Armstrong Williams received $240,000 from the Department of Education to shill for "No Child Left Behind," CREW filed a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to 22 government agencies, including all cabinet agencies, to pursue the scandal.

CREW is also relentlessly pursuing Majority Leader Tom DeLay, perhaps the most corrupt politician in America. CREW has been pushing the House Ethics Committee to investigate whether he played a role in any illegal fundraising by committees he directly controlled or violated ethics rules in the course of his leadership of TRMPAC and ARMPAC, both of which are the subject of the criminal indictments.

It takes an exceptional leader like Melanie Sloan, and the fine team she has assembled, to pull off the immense work of CREW--filing lawsuits, legal actions, and FOIA requests on an almost daily basis. CREW's workload speaks to the rampant corruption in the Bush administration and Republican led Congress.

Ms. Sloan previously served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia from 1998 through early 2003. Before becoming a prosecutor, Ms. Sloan was Minority Counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee from 1995 to 1998. She worked directly with the Honorable John Conyers, the ranking member of the Committee, specializing in criminal enforcement issues, including the Independent Counsel law.

In 1994, Ms. Sloan was Counsel for the Crime Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, working for then Representative Charles Schumer. She drafted portions of the 1994 Crime Bill, including the Violence Against Women Act, and worked on issues including the death penalty, mandatory minimum sentencing, and habeas corpus. She received her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Chicago and has published in the Yale Law and Policy Review, the Legal Times, and the Washington Post.

We spoke with Melanie Sloan about corruption in government, sex discrimination at ViaCom in their attempt to hire only a male lobbyist, and Tom DeLay's unethical and potentially criminal activities that his own party hypocritically ignores.

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BuzzFlash: Since the election, it seems most progressives want to keep fighting to defend our democracy. They're looking for institutions and organizations that are doing the same. Your organization, CREW, which stands for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, is fighting on several fronts. More progressives should know about CREW and your efforts. Could you just start off by giving us a little background about CREW?

Melanie Sloan: CREW started about two years ago now, and it was started to parallel conservative organizations that were already out there using the legal system to highlight ethical issues in government officials. Groups like Judicial Watch, for example, were very active during the nineties. But CREW was started because those organizations, which had been so vocal in the nineties, really had nothing to say when the Bush Administration came in. We felt that there were unmet needs--that there are lots of great organizations that talk about government ethics, but they don't aggressively use the legal system. And that's what CREW does, that's what sets it apart. We look for ways to use the legal system to go after unethical government officials.

BuzzFlash: Your organization is essentially a watch dog group for all types of corruption. Would you say overall that the U.S. government is corrupt? How do you define corruption, and how pervasive is it?

Melanie Sloan: In the current Congress, it's unfortunately become quite pervasive. I think there are a lot of examples in the current Administration where government officials are using their positions to help their friends to become more powerful and a lot richer. And that's how CREW views unethical conduct. We're not concerned with things like who somebody may or may not have slept with. We care about whether politicians and government officials are acting in the public interest. That's what we emphasize when we look at potential corruption and government officials.

BuzzFlash: How can corruption be cleaned up? Do you advocate for specific pieces of legislation that would help close various loopholes or curb some of the corruption that does exist?

Melanie Sloan: Well, just because there are loopholes doesn't mean somebody should use them. Mostly we advocate that government officials monitor their own behavior, and when they fail to do so or when they act unethically, we use the tools at our disposal to try and force them to clean up their act. I do think there are some big problems in ethics. For example, in Congress, there's the House and Senate Ethics Committees, but they don't do anything. So the problem isn't that there aren't ethics rules in Congress. It's that no one is enforcing them. And unfortunately, that's also part of the problem with ethics in the Administration. There may be rules, but they're not enforced. And there is very little way for an outsider to come in and insist that ethics rules be enforced.

One policy we helped draft would create a citizens' suit provision for ethics violations, which is sort of like an environmental statute's ability--the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. Citizens can step in and sue if the federal government doesn't go after the leader or the one endangering the wildlife or something like that. And there's a provision that people can come in and sue. It's sort of a private Attorney General. And we would advocate as to more provisions for ethics violations.

BuzzFlash: I want to talk to you about a handful of specific issues that you worked on personally. There's a recent press release from your organization, CREW, that called for  an Equal Opportunity Commission investigation into ViaCom for its hiring practices. Just to give our readers some background--the company sent out an e-mail for a job opening that reads: "We need to hire a junior lobbyist PAC manager. Attached is a job description. Salary is $85,000 to $90,000. Must be male with Republican stripes." If this isn't an example of a smoking gun about the preponderance of the boys' club, I don't know what is.

Melanie Sloan: First ViaCom tried to deny it, and they sent an e-mail saying that that was just an informal e-mail somebody sent to a friend. I guess, somehow, informal discrimination is therefore acceptable discrimination. And then, after a couple of bloggers got ahold of it, ViaCom said that it was a hoax--the initial e-mail was just a hoax. It wasn't a hoax. It wasn't a joke. It was nothing written in a particularly joke-y way. Of course they wanted a Republican. And unfortunately, you can't sue somebody for only hiring Republicans. But you can sue them for hiring only men. Unfortunately we don't yet have a plaintiff. I don't know of anyone yet who's been discriminated against by ViaCom. But it certainly seems that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Congress should investigate Viacom's hiring practices. I find it remarkable that ViaCom would send an e-mail like that to, of all places, Congress, which passed Title VII in the first place forty years ago.

It's outrageous. It's just so appalling. And that ViaCom thinks they can somehow pop this off as nothing, when clearly they wanted a guy. And they've also tried saying, well, they hire lots of women. I don't care if they hire lots of women. I don't care if you fill the place with women. In any particular hiring, you cannot sit there and keep that job and say I only want a man.

You have to wonder about ViaCom. We looked at who they give money to, as well, and they give very little money to women when we looked at Congressional donations. They gave only to a handful of women, while they gave to large numbers of men. Of course, they gave to more Republicans than Democrats. But even within that, the number of women was minimal.

BuzzFlash: Another story that got buried which your organization did a lot of work on was the story that staffers on the Senate Democratic Judiciary Committee had their e-mail and various documents spied on by GOP staffers over the course of eighteen months. And you filed a FOIA request to the Department of Justice. Not too surprising, with John Ashcroft as the Attorney General, the Justice Department failed to turn over many of those documents. Now that the election is over, is there an investigation pending or has that story just gone away?

Melanie Sloan: We filed suit against the Justice Department, in federal court now, asking that the court find the Department of Justice in violation of the Freedom of Information Act, in their failing to give us the documents. The shocking thing about that case is that the Justice Department has those documents at all. The Justice Department has documents that were stolen from the computers of Democrats, but didn't call Democratic Senators to inform them that, hey, somebody's obviously been accessing your documents, because we have them. And the question is, why didn't the Justice Department return them? I think the Justice Department is going to have a hell of a time in court with that argument. Instead of the Justice Department saying, oh, we don't have them, the Justice Department is trying to say, yeah, we do have them, but we're privileged. We don't have to turn those over. And I think they're going to lose.

BuzzFlash: Only George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have more problems with ethics and integrity than the Republican Majority Leader, Tom DeLay--and some would even debate that. Give us an update on the ethics charges against DeLay and his failure to file his full financial report and release his financial records with the IRS and the State of Texas with respect to PAC money and some potentially unethical, or illegal, activity.

Melanie Sloan: The biggest hope now in the DeLay matter is really whether the District Attorney down in Texas will actually indict him. I'm a former prosecutor, and it seems to me that they are going to have enough to indict DeLay. I think what's happening now is the DA is probably trying to get some of the folks we have indicted to talk about DeLay --get them to, what we call, flip. And it seems like that might be happening.

On the Ethical Committee, the House Committee on Standards and Official Conduct, still has pending before it the complaint against DeLay regarding all of his TrimPac donations and all the corporate donations that were made to TrimPac. If DeLay gets indicted, then it's possible that, yes, the Committee will take that back up.

We are not going to just sit still on Tom DeLay. I do think he's the most unethical politician in America today. We will be constantly looking for ways to convince the rest of America that he is, in fact, as corrupt as he seems, so that eventually he'll be ousted. There's just no place for a man as corrupt as Tom DeLay in Congress, much less as the Majority Leader.

BuzzFlash: What would you say is the problem with corruption in America? Is it the system? Is it the people running it? Is it a combination of both?

Melanie Sloan: The biggest problem is that most Americans don't pay close enough attention, because politicians could only be this corrupt because we keep voting them back into office. If we made it a priority and said ethics are really important, and we're not going to vote for unethical politicians, politicians wouldn't be corrupt. That's the biggest problem. And then, because we ignore it, politicians get away with all sorts of abominable behavior like Tom DeLay does. Because the American public doesn't care enough to vote unethical politicians out of office, Congress doesn't have to worry about suffering repercussions for failing to take ethics seriously itself, and doesn't feel the need to police itself.

BuzzFlash: I know you've been in Washington for many years. Are there any changes now from years ago about the types of ethics complaints and issues? Or are we still fighting essentially the same old issues but with different people and different faces?

Melanie Sloan: I think it's the same sort of issues. But with this Congress, and in the last five years or so, it's gotten much worse in that the standards of ethical conduct--what people are willing to publicly admit to--is just much greater. Ten years ago you would not have seen somebody passing a law, or passing a new rule, the Republicans recently did, saying, well, even if you're indicted, you can stay as Majority Leader and stay in the leadership--because that would be seen as being beyond the pale. Nothing now is beyond the pale. As long as you're bringing in money, there's nothing you can't get away with in this town. It's all about money. And, unfortunately, one of the biggest problems in America today is our election finance system. We need public financing for all elections. Politicians care about nothing more than being reelected, and they need money to do that, so until we address this issue, there probably won't be any huge changes.

BuzzFlash: You spoke earlier about how difficult it is to get people to pay attention. Many ethical complaints and concerns can be complicated, tracing the money and influence from all kinds of sources, multiple lobbyists and political operatives acting as middle people. It's far easier when it's just a sex scandal. What advice do you have for other progressives? How can they go about educating their neighbors about corruption in Washington when it can be so complicated?

Melanie Sloan: I think people have to pay attention to what's going on in Congress. When it comes up, a lot of people don't even like to talk about politics at the dinner table. But people should talk about it, and they should talk about the specifics about what politicians are doing wrong, and why it's not okay. In the end, the things that Tom DeLay is doing are not so hard to understand. I think it's the press that doesn’t seem very interested in reporting on these stories. Most of the mainstream press thinks, well, this is just politics as usual in Washington. But everybody needs to be insisting that we're not going to just stand by and accept this. If it is politics as usual, then politics needs to change altogether. The whole system needs to go. People need to just start insisting on higher standards from both politicians and from the reporters who cover Washington.

BuzzFlash: As an organization that works on ethics, you've got your work cut out for you for the next four years. What do you see as your focus during the second George W. Bush presidential term?

Melanie Sloan: To stay on top of these guys every step of the way, and to not let them get away with anything. We view our role as to bring any ethical issue we come across to the public's attention, and we think one of the best ways to do that is through legal action. That's why we currently have three lawsuits pending in the courts. And we will continue to file our lawsuits when the Administration resists providing the information they're required to under law, or when agencies violate the law.

BuzzFlash: Thank you so much for speaking with us.

Melanie Sloan: Thank you.

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

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Resources:

CREW website
http://www.citizensforethics.org/

Great book on Tom DeLay--The Hammer: Tom DeLay: God, Money, and the Rise of the Republican Congress
http://www.buzzflash.com/premiums/04/10/pre04059.html

Tom DeLay, BuzzFlash Hypocrite of the Week, October 2, 2004
http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/04/10/edi04070.html

Tom DeLay, BuzzFlash Hypocrite of the Week, January 30, 2004
http://www.buzzflash.com/editorial/04/01/edi04007.html