Best newspaper graphic ever
A fundraising director who quit and returned most of his salary after four days as an employee of ex-U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman characterized the work environment as “horrific” for Washington, D.C., interns, according to his testimony in the second week of the former Republican lawmaker’s fraud trial in a Houston federal court.
A crew of volunteer interns worked in a cramped office making as many as 2,000 fundraising calls all day — at a lobbying firm rather than the congressman’s office — and had to hustle to find their own summer lodging, according to Sean McMahon, the short-lived fundraising director.
“The situation with interns is horrific,” McMahon wrote — before the interns began at the lobbying firm office — in an email entered as evidence in the case. “Every single one of them believes they are having a normal ‘Hill internship.’ This is not the case.”
[…]
Among more than a dozen witnesses Monday was Stockman’s former secretary on Capitol Hill, Kristine Nichols. She said before she started at his office the congressman said she had to take a mandatory ethics course. Everyone did.
Nichols testified she asked Stockman, who had been a friend before she was hired, whether he took the course, too.
“He said he wasn’t planning to go because then they might hold him to the rules,” she said.
Ouch. See here and here for earlier updates. I’m not sure what this was intended to establish other than the fact that nobody seems to like Steve Stockman, but I’m here for it anyway. There was some more testimony about his attempt to “sting” State Rep. James White as well.
And from Tuesday.
Former U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman recruited top officials from the Egyptian defense ministry to help solicit a $30 million donation from an international cement company facing legal trouble, according to testimony in the second week of the GOP lawmaker’s federal corruption trial.
Stockman claimed the funds would go toward educating Americans about the historic importance of Egypt and the Middle East, or perhaps toward shipping medical supplies to Egypt and Africa, a witness testified Tuesday.
The hefty donation from CEMEX, an international cement company founded in Mexico, apparently never materialized. But prosecutors say the aide who helped arrange Stockman’s trip to Egypt to meet with officials was paid with money from another donation Stockman solicited for another of his pet causes. He had told an investor he wanted to establish Freedom House, a facility for conservative Capitol Hill interns in Washington, D.C.
The government lawyers say these trips and expenditures demonstrate how Stockman took hundreds of thousands of dollars in charitable donations, and rather than spending it as promised, he used it to enrich himself. The former GOP lawmaker from Clear Lake is on trial for 28 criminal counts related to syphoning off major donation funds to cover his own personal and political debts in what the government lawyers called a “white collar crime spree.”
But Stockman’s defense team contends that testimony about the Egypt trip and about donation money Stockman funneled into a surveillance project tracking a presumed political opponent at the state capitol amount to meritless theatrics aimed at swaying the jury.
“It’s a time-consuming effort to make Mr. Stockman look like he’s involved in a bunch of shady stuff, none of which is charged in the indictment,” said attorney Sean Buckley.
If your defense is that the prosecution is spending too much time on shady stuff your client did that he wasn’t charged with, I’m thinking you have a tough road ahead. All this and the two Stockman aides who took pleas still haven’t testified.