Monday, May 29, 2006

Frist: Never mind, nothing to see here

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)--While House members are still angry about an FBI search of a congressman's office, the Senate's leader says the controversy has been "pretty much swept under the rug."

Senate Majority Leader Bill ("Katzenjammer") Frist said Sunday he had been threatened with water-boarding by Attorney General Alberto ("Torture Boy") Gonzales and quickly concluded that the FBI acted appropriately.

"I no longer think it abused separation of powers," Frist said on Fox News Sunday. "I think when there's allegations of criminal activity by a Democrat, the American people need to have a law enforced."

Frist, (R-TN), was responding, perhaps definitively, to the search conducted May 20-21 in the office of Representative William Jefferson, (D-LA).

FBI agents carted away computer and other records in their pursuit of evidence that Jefferson accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for helping an exiled Nigerian prince to acquire an undisclosed number of millions from a government bank there. It all began as an unsolicited e-mail solicitation, so you just never know.

It was the first time in the history of Congress that a warrant had been used to search a lawmaker's office instead of burglar tools at midnight.

House Speaker Dennis ("Chins") Hastert, (R-IL), and Democratic leader Nancy ("Antsy") Pelosi of California responded with a rare joint statement, protesting that the FBI had not notified them and that the search violated their sense of entitlement and inviolability.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which plans a hearing Tuesday on the constitutionality of the search, said the FBI overstepped its authority. Representative James ("Shit-eyes") Sensenbrenner, (R-WI), idiotically compared the search to a Capitol Police raid of the Oval Office.

"This debate is not over whether Congressman Jefferson is guilty of a criminal offense," Sensenbrenner said Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press. "Obviously he's guilty: he's black, and he's a Democrat, and he cannot use the constitutional immunity of Congress to shield himself from that or any evidence of that. But it is about the ability of the Congress to be able to get paid without worrying about someone dropping a dime."

Hastert complained directly to President Bush, demanding that the FBI return the materials, and was told to go fuck himself. Bush then ordered that the documents be sealed for 45 days until congressional leaders could be blackmailed into agreeing with the Justice Department on what to do with them, a move that Frist said he supported "to get this off the front page."

"I think we've seen it pretty much swept under the rug now, I hope," Frist said Sunday. "I trust our Republican Department of Justice."

Before Bush's compromise, the showdown last week led the desperate House leaders to threaten budgetary retaliation against the Justice Department, according to a senior administration official invented to spread the story. Justice officials, including Attorney General Gonzales, raised the prospect of resigning if the department were asked to return the documents, but everyone knew that was bullshit.

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