{"id":5433,"date":"2010-05-25T09:47:58","date_gmt":"2010-05-25T13:47:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=5433"},"modified":"2010-05-25T10:08:11","modified_gmt":"2010-05-25T14:08:11","slug":"white-house-self-investigates-pronounces-itself-innocent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/5433\/white-house-self-investigates-pronounces-itself-innocent\/","title":{"rendered":"White House Self-Investigates; Pronounces Itself Innocent"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>For three months, the White House has refused to say whether it offered a job to Representative Joe Sestak to get him to drop his challenge to Senator Arlen Specter in a Pennsylvania Democratic primary, as Mr. Sestak has asserted.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBut the White House wants everyone who suspects that something untoward, or even illegal, might have happened to rest easy; though it still will not reveal what happened, the White House is reassuring skeptics that it has examined its own actions and decided it did nothing wrong.\u00a0 Whatever it was that it did.\u201d &#8212; Peter Baker,<em> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/05\/25\/us\/politics\/25baker.html?hp\" target=\"_blank\">The New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That\u2019s about as succinct an explanation of a growing kerfuffle as can be written.\u00a0 The kerfuffle is growing because the second worst White House Press Secretary in living memory, Robert Gibbs, decided to run a cutesy stonewall when Sestak first made his allegation (when the White House was against his candidacy before it was for his candidacy), and now has escalated it into the annals of political kerfuffledom.<\/p>\n<p>It would take a Special Prosecutor longer to get an office set up than it would to resolve this.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Someone (maybe multiple someones) carrying a White House briefcase said something to Sestak about a job,\u00a0 seemingly linked to him abandoning his candidacy.\u00a0 Couldn\u2019t have been a very long conversation.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Interview Sestak.\u00a0 Interview the someone (or someones).\u00a0 Conclude whether or not there is reason to believe the conversation crossed the legal line.\u00a0 Conclude whether or not any party interviewed committed perjury during the really brief investigation.\u00a0 Proceed to grand jury or issue a report.<\/p>\n<p>But hey.\u00a0 Summer\u2019s here.\u00a0 Let\u2019s instead have yet another spittle-spewing Washington circus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For three months, the White House has refused to say whether it offered a job to Representative Joe Sestak to get him to drop his challenge to Senator Arlen Specter in a Pennsylvania Democratic primary, as Mr. Sestak has asserted. \u201cBut the White House wants everyone who suspects that something untoward, or even illegal, might [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[30,1309,1308,1310,44],"class_list":["post-5433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-arlen-specter","tag-job","tag-joe-sestak","tag-pennsylvania-democratic-primary","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5433"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5433\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5436,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5433\/revisions\/5436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}