History > 2006 > USA > House of Representatives (III)

House Approves

Power for Warrantless Wiretaps

September 29, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The House voted on Thursday to give the president the formal power to order wiretaps on Americans without a court order for 90 days, even as a federal judge in Detroit once again declared the administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants to be illegal.

The House approved the surveillance measure, 232 to 191, after rejecting efforts by Democrats and some Republicans to impose greater restrictions on the wiretapping authority.

It appears all but certain that Congress will not reach an agreement on a final surveillance bill before its pre-election recess this week.

Senate Republicans held out hope that they would vote on Friday or Saturday on a bill of theirs that takes a different approach to regulating wiretapping and has the backing of the White House.

Even if the Senate acts this week, lawmakers agreed, there would not be time before the recess for House-Senate negotiators to reach an accord on a final plan, depriving the White House of the chance to sign a bill into law before Election Day.

The legislation took on greater urgency on Thursday after the court ruling in Detroit, as Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of Federal District Court gave the government a week to appeal her decision of Aug. 17 on the wiretapping program or shut it down.

In her earlier ruling, Judge Taylor had found that the surveillance program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was illegal and unconstitutional, violating First and Fourth Amendment protections by allowing wiretaps on Americans’ international communications without a court-ordered warrant.

Judge Taylor reaffirmed that finding after a hearing on Thursday, when she said that she thought it was unlikely that the United States Court of Appeals for Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, would overrule her. Her decision, she said, was based on “settled law.”

The Justice Department immediately filed an emergency motion with the appeals court, asking it to suspend Judge Taylor’s ruling while it considers “the important legal issues” raised by the case, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. Stopping the program while the appeals court considers it would pose “a drastic risk of harm to the nation,” the department said in its filing.

Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who leads the House Intelligence Committee, said the Detroit ruling “underscores the importance of Congressional approval of legislation to modernize” federal surveillance laws in the fight against terrorism.

The bill that the House passed on Thursday with Mr. Hoekstra’s backing formalized the president’s authority to act outside the confines of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Congress passed that act in 1978 in response to domestic spying on political figures and antiwar protesters.

The bill gives the president the authority to order wiretaps for up to 90 days without a court order on Americans suspected of having ties to terrorists if the president determines there is an “imminent threat” to the United States.

Representative Heather A. Wilson, the New Mexico Republican who wrote the measure, said it would also impose additional Congressional oversight after what she called the administration’s “inappropriate” failure to brief the full Intelligence Committees on the surveillance program.

Ms. Wilson said she believed that the bill struck the right balance between giving the government the tools it needed to fight terrorism and protecting the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.

“This is not some drift net,” she said.

A bipartisan amendment offered by Representatives Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, and Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, sought to limit wiretaps without warrants to a maximum of 7 days rather than 90. The amendment would affirm the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as the “exclusive” means of conducting intelligence surveillance.

Mr. Schiff said in an interview that Ms. Wilson’s bill would effectively gut the current intelligence law and give the president broad and sweeping authority at the expense of the courts. His effort failed, 221 to 202. Ms. Wilson’s measure also faced behind-the-scenes resistance from the Bush administration, which had pressed her to bring the bill more in line with the Senate version to speed a final bill, Senate officials said.

The Senate bill would offer a differing and somewhat broader approach to resolving the issue by submitting the entire surveillance program to the foreign intelligence court for a one-time review of its constitutionality.

Critics of the approach said it would give the president virtually unchecked authority if the program were to be declared legal.

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who worked out the compromise with the White House, said he saw it as the only viable way to ensure some measure of judicial review over the program.

John Carpenter contributed reporting from Detroit

House Approves Power for Warrantless Wiretaps, 29.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/washington/29nsa.html

House clears $70 billion

mostly for Iraq war

Tue Sep 26, 2006 11:03 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday gave final approval to a massive funding bill for the Pentagon that provides another $70 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Senate was expected to pass the final version of the $447.6 billion bill by this weekend, sending it to President George W. Bush for his signature.

The House passed it 394-22 with virtually no debate as lawmakers worked to complete business before breaking to campaign for November elections that will determine control of Congress.

In a slap at Bush, the bill would bar the administration from using money from it to construct permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq or to exercise any control over Iraq's oil sector.

Both the House and Senate have approved that language before, but until this bill Republicans had stripped it in House-Senate conferences.

Democrats and many Republicans say the Iraqi insurgency has been fueled by perceptions that the United States has ambitions for a permanent presence in the country. They have called on Bush to make a policy statement that the United States has no such plans.

With this bill, Congress will have approved more than $500 billion for the wars, with the bulk of that spent in Iraq. Lawmakers called the $70 billion a "bridge fund" to last about halfway through the next fiscal year, which starts on October 1.

About $23 billion of that is to replace and refurbish equipment worn out in the harsh environments of the two conflicts.

The bill provides $377.6 billion for the Pentagon's core programs, $4.1 billion less than Bush wanted but $19 billion above current levels.

It funds a 2.2 percent military pay raise, and provide $557 million more for the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard than Bush sought.

    House clears $70 billion mostly for Iraq war, R, 26.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-09-27T030312Z_01_N26377365_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-CONGRESS.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-3

In House Race, Focus Shifts to Security

September 24, 2006
The New York Times
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ

For much of this year, Representative Nancy L. Johnson, a moderate Republican from Connecticut, has run the kind of campaign she has run many times before in this swing district, focusing on domestic issues like health care and taxes, even as she distanced herself from her party’s conservative leaders in Congress.

But in recent days, Mrs. Johnson has taken her campaign down a sharply different path, shifting the battle with her Democratic opponent, Christopher S. Murphy, to a new front, national security.

The day after the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Mrs. Johnson began showing a television commercial assailing Mr. Murphy, a state senator, as weak on defense because he has criticized the Bush administration’s program of warrantless surveillance.

Then, on Monday, Mrs. Johnson stood alongside Senator John McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam and a strong supporter of the war in Iraq, during an appearance in Danbury, Conn., before military veterans.

“The security of our people is my No. 1 priority,” she told reporters before the event with Mr. McCain, a Republican of Arizona.

Her campaign has also begun referring to Mr. Murphy as a “Ned Lamont liberal,” a pointed reference to the antiwar candidate who defeated Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a vocal supporter of the Iraq war, in the Democratic primary last month. Mr. Lamont won her district with 52 percent of the vote.

It has not always been this way for Mrs. Johnson, who in her 12 terms in Congress — the longest tenure in the state’s history — has earned a reputation as a serious policy thinker on health care and social programs.

Democrats say her tactical shift shows that the race has tightened and that she is mounting a negative campaign out of desperation.

But Mrs. Johnson’s new focus on terrorism also shows that Republicans believe that national security is still a winning issue for them, even in a state where opposition to the war in Iraq is high, support for President Bush is low and their candidate is far better known for domestic policy.

Polls show that voters, despite qualms about the president and the war, still give Republicans an edge in dealing with terrorism.

Mrs. Johnson’s moves coincide with an effort by Mr. Bush to make the case that tough defense policies have made America safer since the 9/11 attacks, but that the threats against the nation remain.

Though Mrs. Johnson has kept her distance from Mr. Bush on other issues, she has begun to echo that message with gusto.

Her district is one of about 40 around the country that are deemed to be in play as the Democrats try to reclaim control of the House this fall.

Underscoring the importance of the race, the National Republican Congressional Committee plans to spend $1.2 million on television advertisements supporting Mrs. Johnson during the final weeks of the race, while the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee plans to spend $1.8 million to try to defeat her.

The new thrust of the Johnson campaign follows a bruising summer in which Mr. Murphy and at least one prominent liberal group, MoveOn.org Political Action, spent thousands of dollars seeking to portray her as an entrenched member of a Congress with ties to special interest lobbyists.

The Johnson campaign asserts that she has often defied her party’s leadership, on issues including drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve and stem cell research.

It also cites endorsements from organizations like the League of Conservation Voters as evidence of her independence.

Now, though, Republicans say that Mr. Murphy’s criticism of the surveillance program has provided a golden opportunity to make the election a choice between two candidates with distinct views on national security and on other issues, instead of a referendum on the currently unpopular Republican-controlled Congress.

There is, of course, some risk for Mrs. Johnson in aligning herself more closely with the president, who in a poll last month by Quinnipiac University received an approval rating below 30 percent in Connecticut. The poll was conducted before the president began his public push on national security.

In an interview, Mrs. Johnson would not discuss the politics driving her decision to put national security at the forefront of her campaign. But again and again, in simple and stark language, she argued that her opponent failed to grasp the gravity of the threat.

“He doesn’t understand the need for a tough policy,” she said. “I want my constituents to know that the threat is real.”

Under the surveillance program, the government, without warrants, has monitored the international communications of people in the United States.

The Johnson campaign has asserted that Mr. Murphy would force the government to go through the time-consuming process of getting a court order before wiretapping communications involving suspected terrorists.

Mr. Murphy has responded that the Johnson campaign is trying to distort his position, which he said would not cause delays in monitoring suspected terrorists. The Bush administration, he said, was violating the law by circumventing existing procedures, which allow the attorney general to authorize the emergency use of electronic surveillance provided that he subsequently seeks court authorization within 72 hours.

The campaign debate is so fierce that only an hour after Mrs. Johnson’s event with Mr. McCain, Mr. Murphy accused her of “playing politics” with national security.

“I think it’s pretty disgusting that Nancy Johnson has decided to politicize the 9/11 attacks,” Mr. Murphy told reporters.

So far, Mrs. Johnson has pumped much more money into the race than Mr. Murphy, spending about $1 million compared with roughly $181,000 by him, according to their latest campaign finance reports. Both campaigns have large reserves of cash as they approach the final weeks of the race: $2.6 million for Mrs. Johnson and about $1 million for Mr. Murphy.

The Iraq war has not played as central a role in the contest as it has elsewhere in the state, where antiwar activists have put Mr. Lieberman and another strong supporter of the war, Representative Christopher Shays, a Republican, on the defensive.

The Murphy campaign has raised the issue, criticizing Mrs. Johnson for voting to authorize the military invasion of Iraq.

But while Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Shays have been outspoken in their support of the war, Mrs. Johnson has not talked all that much about her position, which is to support the president.

Beyond that, Mrs. Johnson’s views about what to do in Iraq do not appear to differ significantly from Mr. Murphy’s. Both are against an open-ended American military presence in that country, and both argue that Iraqis need to play a greater role in their own defense so that the United States can begin reducing the number of troops there.

Mrs. Johnson is opposed to a timetable for withdrawing troops. Mr. Murphy says that Washington should advance a schedule for withdrawing troops, to prod the Iraqis into taking greater control of their own security, but that the specifics of removing troops should be left to American military leaders.

Mrs. Johnson stuck to her strategy through the week, talking about national security again on Friday during an appearance in Waterbury to accept an endorsement from a political action committee representing veterans.

In the meantime, the Murphy campaign says it still intends to make Mrs. Johnson an emblem of the excesses of one-party control in Washington and what it describes as a Republican penchant for bestowing favors on big campaign contributors.

In particular, the campaign has cited the acceptance by Mrs. Johnson, one of the top fund-raisers in Congress, of tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries in 2003, around the time she helped write legislation adding prescription drug benefits to Medicare. Democrats have complained that the new drug program would enrich insurance and drug companies at the expense of the elderly.

But Mrs. Johnson has been aggressively promoting the prescription program and her work on it.

In an interview, Mr. Murphy said that Mrs. Johnson’s attacks concerning national security would not resonate with voters because the Republicans have failed to address other security issues, including ports, and because the war in Iraq has made the nation less safe.

“It’s familiar ground for them,” he said of the Republicans’ attempts to portray him and other Democrats as weak on national security. “But it’s much more dangerous.”

    In House Race, Focus Shifts to Security, NYT, 24.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/nyregion/24johnson.html

Editorial

Keep Away the Vote

September 21, 2006
The New York Times

One of the cornerstones of the Republican Party’s strategy for winning elections these days is voter suppression, intentionally putting up barriers between eligible voters and the ballot box. The House of Representatives took a shameful step in this direction yesterday, voting largely along party lines for onerous new voter ID requirements. Laws of this kind are unconstitutional, as an array of courts have already held, and profoundly undemocratic. The Senate should not go along with this cynical, un-American electoral strategy.

The bill the House passed yesterday would require people to show photo ID to vote in 2008. Starting in 2010, that photo ID would have to be something like a passport, or an enhanced kind of driver’s license or non-driver’s identification, containing proof of citizenship. This is a level of identification that many Americans simply do not have.

The bill was sold as a means of deterring vote fraud, but that is a phony argument. There is no evidence that a significant number of people are showing up at the polls pretending to be other people, or that a significant number of noncitizens are voting.

Noncitizens, particularly undocumented ones, are so wary of getting into trouble with the law that it is hard to imagine them showing up in any numbers and trying to vote. The real threat of voter fraud on a large scale lies with electronic voting, a threat Congress has refused to do anything about.

The actual reason for this bill is the political calculus that certain kinds of people — the poor, minorities, disabled people and the elderly — are less likely to have valid ID. They are less likely to have cars, and therefore to have drivers’ licenses. There are ways for nondrivers to get special ID cards, but the bill’s supporters know that many people will not go to the effort if they don’t need them to drive.

If this bill passed the Senate and became law, the electorate would likely become more middle-aged, whiter and richer — and, its sponsors are anticipating, more Republican.

Court after court has held that voter ID laws of this kind are unconstitutional. This week, yet another judge in Georgia struck down that state’s voter ID law.

Last week, a judge in Missouri held its voter ID law to be unconstitutional. Supporters of the House bill are no doubt hoping that they may get lucky, and that the current conservative Supreme Court might uphold their plan.

America has a proud tradition of opening up the franchise to new groups, notably women and blacks, who were once denied it. It is disgraceful that, for partisan political reasons, some people are trying to reverse the tide, and standing in the way of people who have every right to vote.

    Keep Away the Vote, NYT, 21.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/21/opinion/21thu1.html

House panel backs Bush on detainees

Wed Sep 20, 2006 10:58 PM ET
Reuters
By Thomas Ferraro and Vicki Allen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a dramatic reversal, a U.S. House of Representatives panel on Wednesday endorsed President George W. Bush's plan for tough interrogations and trials of foreign terrorism suspects after Republicans rounded up enough members to turn defeat into victory.

Embarrassed Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee were forced to hold a second vote to pass Bush's bill after losing the first one to Democrats and a couple of defecting Republicans. They then mustered absent members to eke out a 20-19 majority to send the bill to the House floor.

On another national security issue before the November 7 congressional elections, the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees, on separate votes, narrowly approved legislation to impose new rules on Bush's warrantless domestic spying program.

Both measures are certain to be hotly debated in the House and Senate before members go home in October to campaign for re-election.

The committee vote on the interrogations measure reflected divisions among House Republicans over Bush's bill, as moderates and a few conservatives questioned whether Bush's plan would backfire on U.S. personnel in future wars and whether it met U.S. judicial standards.

Bush wants the authority from Congress to allow a program of CIA interrogations and detentions that critics have said amount to torture. The White House denies the program involves torture. The U.S. Supreme Court in June struck down Bush's original plan.

House Majority Leader John Boehner of Ohio shrugged off the Republican defections and called Democrats' opposition "just one more in a long line of troubling actions that weaken our ability to wage and win the Global War on Terror."

The White House is trying to reach a compromise with a group of rebelling Senate Republicans over the bill, Without a deal, his measure faces almost certain defeat in the Senate as Democrats and a number of Republicans say it would allow abusive interrogations and unfair trials.

The U.S. general who oversees the Guantanamo prison for terrorism suspects urged Congress on Wednesday to offer clear guidance on what interrogation techniques are prohibited under international accords barring inhumane treatment of war prisoners.

Gen. Bantz Craddock, outgoing chief of the Miami-based U.S. Southern Command, said military interrogators needed a precise definition of what constituted "outrages on personal dignity" -- prohibited under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

DEBATE ON SURVEILLANCE

Republican backers of Bush's warrantless domestic spying program said the new legislation would update surveillance laws, bolster oversight and spell out when and how a president can order such surveillance without a court order.

Opponents, mostly Democrats, said the legislation would expand presidential powers and threaten civil liberties.

The bill now goes to the full House. The Senate is struggling to agree on a surveillance measure of its own.

Critics charge the surveillance program, begun shortly after the September 11 attacks, violates the law requiring warrants for eavesdropping on suspects inside the United States.

A federal judge recently ruled the program illegal. The case is expected to end up in the Supreme Court after Bush appealed, arguing he had the inherent power to do it.

Bush has been accused of surpassing his authority in a number of areas since the September 11 attacks, including the indefinite detention and harsh treatment of foreign terrorism suspects and overly aggressive counterterrorism measures domestically.

(Additional reporting by David Morgan and Joanne Kenen)

    House panel backs Bush on detainees, R, 20.9.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-09-21T025754Z_01_N20234847_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-GUANTANAMO-VOTE.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C1-TopStories-newsOne-2

In Case Against Politician, a Tale of Friendship, Ambition and Betrayal

September 16, 2006
The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — In July 2005, Vernon L. Jackson returned home to Louisville from Washington, where he had just met with Representative William J. Jefferson, the Louisiana Democrat who had been helping promote his fledgling digital-technology company. David Harper, a lawyer for the company, said he had never seen Mr. Jackson so demoralized.

For nearly five years, the inventor and the congressman had carried the message that Mr. Jackson’s company, iGate, could help close the “digital divide” by delivering high-speed Internet access to poor blacks around the world.

They had flown to Africa to seek business opportunities, and they had talked up iGate to potential partners at the Kentucky Derby and the United States Open tennis tournament in New York.

But now, with iGate starved for cash, Mr. Jackson was convinced that Mr. Jefferson, his “friend on the Hill,” was about to betray him, Mr. Harper recalled.

Over breakfast at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, the congressman had made a proposal that, in Mr. Jackson’s view, was tantamount to theft: in return for a quick infusion of cash, Mr. Harper said, Mr. Jefferson and his investors would take control of iGate and its promising broadband patents while easing Mr. Jackson aside and cutting off most of the company’s creditors.

Unbeknownst to the two men, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been monitoring their dealings. Less than three weeks later, agents raided Mr. Jefferson’s homes, in Washington and in New Orleans, and found stacks of cash stuffed in a freezer.

Mr. Jackson, 54, has pleaded guilty to paying more than $400,000 in bribes for Mr. Jefferson’s help; on Sept. 8, he was sentenced to seven years in prison. An F.B.I. search of the congressman’s office last May set off a showdown between Congress and the Justice Department. Mr. Jefferson has denied any wrongdoing and remains under investigation.

In recent months, the outlines of the case have emerged in court filings and news reports. But an examination of court records and dozens of internal iGate documents, as well as interviews with a number of Mr. Jackson’s associates, offers a far clearer picture of the relationship between the two men, and of how Mr. Jefferson went from helping a small company to trying to take it over for his family’s benefit.

Mr. Jefferson, 59, grew up poor on a cotton farm yet became one of the most prominent black members of Congress, with a seat on the powerful Ways and Means Committee. He developed a reputation for nurturing black entrepreneurs, like Mr. Jackson, and working to expand trade with Africa.

Jobs for Family Members

Soon after meeting Mr. Jackson in late 2000, Mr. Jefferson prodded the Pentagon to test one of iGate’s products, documents show. He recruited investors and did favors for iGate’s leading supplier. He also lobbied political leaders in Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon to include iGate in telecommunications projects, while repeatedly urging the Export-Import Bank of the United States to finance the deals.

And each time the company seemed poised to take off, records show, Mr. Jefferson sought a greater share of the potential profits for his family.

His wife, Andrea, had a marketing contract with iGate; their eldest daughter did legal work for iGate and one of its investors; and Mrs. Jefferson’s brother-in-law was iGate’s chief engineer. Even before the congressman brought up the takeover proposal, he had arranged for a consulting firm owned by his wife and five daughters to receive nearly 31 million shares of iGate stock, roughly a quarter of the company, at no cost, documents show.

The F.B.I. has said that Mr. Jefferson also sought a substantial share of profits made by iGate’s partners in a Nigerian venture, and that a complaint from one of those investors prompted the investigation.

“Greed is one thing,” said William A. Warner, a former I.B.M. executive who had a contract to market iGate’s products. “But this guy took it to another level.”

Mr. Jefferson’s lawyer, Robert P. Trout, said that given the investigation, the congressman and his family would not discuss their dealings with iGate. Mr. Jefferson, who is seeking a ninth term in office, said earlier this year that his family’s dealings with Mr. Jackson were legitimate, and that when “all is said and done, you will see that there is an honorable explanation for everything.”

But in his guilty plea, Mr. Jackson asserted that iGate’s payments to the family’s consulting firm amounted to bribes for Mr. Jefferson’s help. He also said he believed that if he had stopped paying, Mr. Jefferson would have quit helping him.

Mr. Jackson, a boisterous man as big as a football lineman, has been cooperating with federal authorities. In a recent interview, he declined to talk about details of the case. But he said that while he had lost an earlier company to chicanery by business associates, “I didn’t think it was going to happen to me in dealing with someone in government.”

Several of Mr. Jackson’s associates described him as an innovative engineer, if a bit naïve about business.

As a minority student with top science scores, he was recruited in high school by Bell Labs, which paid for him to get an associate’s degree in electronics. After rising over 20 years to senior engineer, Mr. Jackson said he retired and started a company to develop videoconferencing from desktop computers.

The collapse of that business led him to start iGate in 1998, with a focus on delivering high-speed Internet access over the old copper phone wires. Mr. Jackson said he thought military bases, corporate campuses, hospitals and schools would be able to use iGate’s relay boxes to send graphics and streaming video to outlying buildings without expensive fiber-optic lines. He also hoped to interest the phone companies.

Vying for an Army Contract

Mr. Jackson and Mr. Jefferson were introduced in late 2000 by a Washington consultant, Jack W. White, who had been hired to sell iGate’s technology to the Army. Mr. Jefferson soon called an Army official to his office to press for a test of the device, which supported iGate’s claims about data-transfer speeds.

In early 2001, the congressman told Mr. Jackson that he could not provide any more help, according to court documents filed in connection with the F.B.I.’s search of the congressman’s office and Mr. Jackson’s guilty plea. Instead, he recommended hiring the ANJ Group, a consulting firm just incorporated under the names of his wife and his daughters.

The women were hardly marketing professionals: Mrs. Jefferson was vice chancellor of the New Orleans campus of Southern University, and while the Jeffersons’ oldest daughter was a lawyer, the others were still in school. Even so, iGate’s agreement with ANJ provided for payments of $7,500 a month, plus 5 percent of any money it raised from investors and 5 percent of sales over $5 million it made for iGate. Mr. Jackson also gave ANJ 100,000 shares of stock and options for a million more.

Former iGate officials said Mrs. Jefferson made at least two marketing contacts in Louisiana, with a telephone company and a university, though nothing came of them. But, the officials said, it was her husband who kept driving most of the action.

Over dinner in New Orleans that spring, he and Mr. Jackson persuaded five men, mostly Jefferson campaign donors, to invest $375,000 total. One of them, Lloyd L. Villavaso, said he had left feeling an iGate contract with the Army was “pretty much a done deal.”

By mid-2002, Mr. Jackson had persuaded a unit of Siemens, the German conglomerate, to manufacture iGate’s devices. Mr. Jefferson attended iGate’s annual shareholder meeting with a Siemens executive and an Army testing official, and that summer, Siemens invited Mr. Jackson to a stock-car race, where iGate’s slogan, “Communications in Motion,” was painted on two cars.

The congressman later did several favors for Siemens, at Mr. Jackson’s request. Mr. Jefferson offered, for example, to arrange for the company’s chief executive to be taken to the front of the customs line when he flew in from Germany, and he set up a meeting with Army officials about possible contracts, said Paula Davis, a spokeswoman for Siemens USA.

Reaching Out to Nigeria

Africa was another promising market, former iGate officials said, because few countries there could afford fiber-optic lines. In June 2003, the congressman introduced Mr. Jackson to officials at Netlink Digital Television, a Nigerian company that agreed to invest $45 million to use iGate’s products in Africa. At this point, Mr. Jackson was developing a new product, a “triple play” switch that could deliver voice, data and video communications to home and business consumers. Netlink was to put up $6.5 million and finance the rest, with Mr. Jefferson’s help, through the Export-Import Bank.

As Mr. Jackson began gearing up, Mr. Jefferson moved to increase his family’s stake: in late July 2003, court papers show, he presented Mr. Jackson with an amendment to the ANJ contract, giving the firm 35 percent of iGate profits in Africa.

But relations soured with the Nigerian company, and by early 2004, Netlink was demanding some money back. The F.B.I. said Mr. Jefferson had also expected to receive a share of Netlink’s profits. Agents found a letter the company’s lawyer had sent the congressman that May, accusing him of breaking Nigerian laws.

In June 2004, Brett M. Pfeffer, a former aide to Mr. Jefferson, introduced him to a Virginia investor, Lori A. Mody, who ran a foundation that supplied technology to public schools. When Ms. Mody wired iGate $3.5 million for a new Nigerian deal, it looked as if the company was finally starting to click.

Mr. Jackson’s original device had passed a field test at Fort Stewart, Ga., and Fort Sam Houston in Texas was about to begin what would become another successful test. Siemens had installed the technology in security systems at Howard University and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. That August, after the company demonstrated the triple-play switch, a top research official at SBC Communications, which later merged with AT&T, asked in an e-mail message to an iGate engineer how the company had managed to surpass an industry standard.

On Aug. 20, 2004, company records show, iGate granted the ANJ Group 30 million shares of stock. And that Labor Day weekend, said Ms. Davis, the Siemens spokeswoman, Siemens treated the congressman, Mr. Jackson and their wives to a weekend in New York, including airfare, lodging and tickets to the United States Open and “The Lion King.”

An Informer Wears a Wire

But before long, nearly all of iGate’s sales initiatives had stalled or begun to crumble. The Army had to pay for the war in Iraq and the fight against terrorism. The biggest phone companies had decided to extend their fiber-optic networks or develop triple-play switches with other suppliers.

Ms. Mody, meanwhile, had become suspicious, and in March 2005, she agreed to wear a wire for the F.B.I.

Over the next several months, she recorded conversations in which Mr. Jefferson pushed for 30 percent of her profits. According to court documents, he suggested that 3o percent go to a Nigerian company owned by his daughters, and that both his sons-in-law be involved in the deal. The F.B.I. said he asked Ms. Mody for $100,000 to bribe Nigeria’s vice president, and agents found nearly all of it in his freezer.

The wire also captured the congressman telling Ms. Mody that he was frustrated with how Mr. Jackson was running iGate, and asking her to help ANJ buy a controlling interest and replace Mr. Jackson. According to the F.B.I., he told Ms. Mody, “I’m in the shadows, behind the curtain.”

Three days later, on July 15, 2005, at the Washington breakfast, the congressman revealed his takeover plan to Mr. Jackson, proposing that iGate be merged into a new company, with Mr. Jackson’s ownership shrinking to 3 percent from 60 percent, said Mr. Harper, the iGate lawyer. Mr. Jackson was offered an incentive: $500,000 in cash and two years on the company’s payroll, at a total additional salary of $1 million. But he rejected the deal, Mr. Harper said.

Since the case became public that August, Mr. Pfeffer, the former Jefferson aide, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges. IGate has rescinded nearly all the Jefferson family’s stock grants. Siemens has severed its ties with Mr. Jackson, and iGate has closed its offices and furloughed its staff.

But even with his looming prison term, which could be reduced if he continues to cooperate, Mr. Jackson has not given up on his dream of providing broadband access both here and in the developing world. He remains disappointed in how slowly the phone companies have upgraded broadband services, and he continues to talk to investors about providing more bandwidth over leased phone or power lines, he said.

He has also become a minister at the Spirit of Peace Missionary Baptist Church here.

The pastor, R. Z. Miller, said that at first he was afraid the scandal might have set Mr. Jackson on “a run for the cross.” But he said Mr. Jackson recently preached about his struggle to embrace forgiveness and atone for his mistakes. “I told Vernon that even though I teach forgiveness,” Mr. Miller said, “I don’t know if I could really forgive like he has.”

    In Case Against Politician, a Tale of Friendship, Ambition and Betrayal, NYT, 16.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/16/washington/16jefferson.html?hp&ex=1158465600&en=84a525551079c293&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Lawmaker Admits He Took Illegal Gifts

September 16, 2006
The New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 — Representative Bob Ney of Ohio admitted Friday that he had effectively put his office up for sale to corrupt Washington lobbyists and a foreign businessman in exchange for illegal gifts that included lavish overseas trips, the use of skyboxes at sports arenas in the Washington area and thousands of dollars worth of gambling chips from London casinos.

In a plea agreement announced by the Justice Department, Mr. Ney, a six-term Republican who once seemed poised to rise far in the House leadership, admitted to a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy and to making false statements about the gifts.

With the agreement, Mr. Ney became the first member of Congress to acknowledge criminal acts in the investigation of the former superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, an inquiry that threatens to ensnare other Republican lawmakers and dim the party’s hopes in the November elections.

Although Mr. Ney could face up to 10 years in prison, federal prosecutors said they would recommend a 27-month sentence for the lawmaker, who announced last month that he was abandoning his campaign for another term. He could also face up to $500,000 in fines.

Mr. Abramoff, once a leading fund-raiser for the Republican Party, pleaded guilty in January to conspiring to corrupt public officials, including Mr. Ney.

In a statement released by his lawyers, Mr. Ney, 52, suggested that his criminal acts were related to alcoholism.

“I have come to recognize that a dependence on alcohol has been a problem for me,” said Mr. Ney, who friends say entered an in-patient alcohol-treatment facility this week. “I am not making any excuses, and I take full responsibility for my actions.”

He said the plea agreement “will enable me to accept responsibility for what I have done, to start repairing the damage I have caused and to start healing my family.”

After several months with little public activity in the two-year-old investigation into Mr. Abramoff’s lobbying operation, Mr. Ney’s plea agreement offered new ammunition to Democratic political strategists hoping to end Republican control of the House and Senate this fall.

The House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, said Mr. Ney’s plea agreement was proof of “what we have long said: the Republican culture of corruption has pervaded Congress.” Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Republican of Illinois, said, “The illegal behavior that Congressman Bob Ney has admitted doing was unacceptable.”

In the plea agreement, Mr. Ney admitted that he had “corruptly solicited and accepted a stream of things of value” from Mr. Abramoff and his lobbying partners. Those partners included Neil G. Volz, Mr. Ney’s former chief of staff, who pleaded guilty to similar conspiracy charges in May.

The list of illegal gifts accepted by Mr. Ney from Mr. Abramoff’s lobbying operation was long: an all-expense-paid golfing trip to Scotland in 2002; a gambling vacation in New Orleans in 2003; meals and drinks at restaurants in and around Washington, mostly at one owned by Mr. Abramoff on Pennsylvania Avenue; and large campaign contributions “from Abramoff’s clients for whom Ney had agreed to perform official acts.”

The official acts, the Justice Department said, included Mr. Ney’s efforts to insert language in House bills to aid Mr. Abramoff and his clients, as well as to place statements in the Congressional Record on their behalf.

The plea agreement suggests that Mr. Ney may have done his most important favor to Mr. Abramoff in 2001 and 2002 when he helped direct a multimillion-dollar Congressional contract to one of Mr. Abramoff’s lobbying clients, a technology company that was contracted to install the infrastructure for wireless telephone service in the House.

In 2002, Mr. Ney admitted, he introduced an amendment in the House to allow a “foreign-beverage-distiller client of Abramoff’s lobbying firm” to label its alcohol as “made in Russia” when in fact it was to be distilled in a former Soviet Republic outside of Russia.

Mr. Ney also admitted accepting thousands of dollars in gambling chips from a foreign businessman who was not named in the court papers but had previously been identified by government officials as Fouad al-Zayat, the Syrian-born owner of an aviation company in Cyprus that sought Mr. Ney’s help in Washington.

In its court papers, the Justice Department said Mr. Ney traveled twice to London — in February and August 2003 — to meet with the businessman, who wanted Mr. Ney’s help in easing an American embargo that barred the sale of airplanes and aviation parts “in a foreign country,” previously identified as Iran; he also wanted Mr. Ney’s help in obtaining an American visa.

During both trips, prosecutors said, Mr. Ney received thousands of dollars worth of chips from London casinos that the lawmaker then parlayed, through his gambling, into an estimated $50,000 — most of it, $47,000, on the August trip.

On returning home in August, the plea agreement said, Mr. Ney gave about $5,000 to a staff member to carry so the lawmaker “could carry and report a lower dollar amount to Customs Services officials upon re-entry into the United States.” On his customs form, Mr. Ney reported that he was bringing only $32,000 into the country. The court papers did not explain the $10,000 discrepancy.

    Lawmaker Admits He Took Illegal Gifts, NYT, 16.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/16/us/16ney.html

House Republicans Will Push for 700 Miles of Fencing on Mexico Border

September 14, 2006
The New York Times
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 — House Republicans announced Wednesday that they would move swiftly to pass legislation requiring the Bush administration to build 700 miles of fencing along the Mexican border to help stem the flow of illegal immigrants and drugs into the United States.

The legislation, which is expected to go to the House floor for a vote on Thursday, would require construction of two layers of reinforced fencing along stretches of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas that are considered among the most porous parts of the border.

It would also require officials of the Department of Homeland Security to establish “operational control” over all American land and sea borders by using Border Patrol agents, fencing, satellites, cameras and unmanned aerial vehicles.

The bill is the first in a series of border security measures House Republicans have promised to pass before the midterm elections in November.

The House majority leader, Representative John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, hailed the legislation as “a critical step towards shutting down the flow of illegal immigration into the United States.”

Democrats promptly criticized the plan as political grandstanding intended to energize conservative voters before the elections.

The House passed a nearly identical fencing provision as part of a border security bill in December. Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, has publicly raised doubt about the effectiveness of border fencing, particularly in remote desert areas.

While the Senate easily approved 370 miles of border fencing in its own immigration bill in May, it is unclear whether the two chambers will be able to reach agreement on the issue before Congress recesses this month. House leaders have said they will not support the Senate bill, which would create a guest worker plan and put millions of illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship in addition to toughening border security.

Jennifer Crider, a spokeswoman for the House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, dismissed the fence bill as partisan politicking. “Republicans have a record of failure on border security,’’ Ms. Pelosi said, “and this is their attempt to cover up that record.’’

House Republicans countered that immigration hearings held across the nation in August showed that Americans expected Congress to toughen border security, particularly while the country remained under threat of terrorist attacks.

Congressional staff members predicted that some House Democrats, especially those from border states, would support the fencing bill.

The barriers, which are to be accompanied by additional lighting, cameras and ground sensors, would be built near Tecate and Calexico on the California border; Columbus, N.M.; and El Paso, Del Rio, Eagle Pass, Laredo and Brownsville in Texas.

House Republicans have also proposed counterfeit-proof Social Security cards for citizens and immigrants searching for work, measures that would require the deportation of immigrants linked to Central American gangs and an increase in the number of Border Patrol agents as part of their border security agenda.

“The first priority of the American people is secure borders,’’ said Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, who is the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

House Republicans said they were encouraged by what they called the success of a 14-mile fence at San Diego that was mandated by Congress in 1996. Crime rates have dropped by 47 percent since the fence was constructed, they said, and the number of illegal immigrants captured dropped to about 9,000 in 2005 from about 200,000 in 1992.

Amy Call, a spokeswoman for the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist of Tennessee, said Senate Republicans would consider the legislation.

“The leader believes very strongly that we need to secure the border,’’ Ms. Call said. “We’ll look at all options to do that.’’

Senator Jeff Sessions, the Alabama Republican who championed the fencing provision in the Senate, praised House Republicans for pushing ahead with the legislation. Mr. Sessions said he was concerned that the Senate proposal, which had been attached to the military appropriations bill, might not receive adequate financing.

“They’ve put forth a strong barrier bill,’’ Mr. Sessions said of House Republicans. “It’s time for us to complete the job.’’

    House Republicans Will Push for 700 Miles of Fencing on Mexico Border, NYT, 14.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/washington/14immig.html