Photograph by Mike Groll/AP Photo

New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli waits for a news conference to begin on Jan. 7, 2013, in Albany, N.Y.

New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, wielding the power of the Empire State’s $160.4 billion pension fund, won the widest margin ever in a shareholder vote in favor of a resolution forcing corporate disclosure of political giving.

The almost 66 percent vote approving the resolution was made public today in a corporate filing by CF Industries Holdings Inc., a Deerfield, Illinois-based fertilizer company.

It beat the 53 percent Sprint Nextel Corp. shareholder-vote passing a similar resolution in 2011, according to DiNapoli.

The resolution’s victory shows momentum toward greater transparency in corporate political funding in the post-Citizens United landscape, he said in an e-mailed statement.

“The tide has shifted on the issue of political spending disclosure,” DiNapoli said. “Shareholders are standing up for transparency and accountability in how shareholder dollars are being used for political purposes.”

It’s the latest win for the 59-year-old Democrat, who has introduced more than two dozen such resolutions at companies in which the fund holds stock. Last month, five companies, including Southwest Airlines and Harley-Davidson, agreed to disclose political spending rather than go through a shareholder vote.

In January, DiNapoli sued Qualcomm, demanding it release political expenditure records. He’s been putting the pressure on companies after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling allowed unlimited spending by corporations and unions in political activities. It kept caps on contributions to political campaigns.

The New York pension fund owned 352,500 shares in CF Industries valued at $64 million as of March 31, according to Eric Sumberg, a DiNapoli spokesman.

Original post is NY Comptroller Scores Record Corporate Political Disclosure Vote by Political Capital.

Photograph by Darren McCollester/Getty Images

A memorial to the Boston Marathon bombing victims on Boylston Street on May 14, 2013.

Today, one month after the bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon that claimed three lives and injured more than 260 people, a certain period of mourning is ending.

At 2:50pm flags at BPD headquarters and Districts will be brought up to full staff

— Boston Police Dept. (@Boston_Police) May 15, 2013

At 2:50pm today, BPD Officers will remove the black mourning bands from their badges and observe a moment of silence

— Boston Police Dept. (@Boston_Police) May 15, 2013

For the many maimed victims of that bombing, of course, the anguish continues.

One of the accused bombers is buried, the surviving brother facing capital charges.

Yet for the community at large, leaders are declaring, “Boston Strong” is becoming Boston Moving On.

Original post is Boston ‘Strong’ Moving On: PD Says by Political Capital.

Photograph by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, right, stand during the National Anthem as they attend the National Peace Officers Memorial Service, an annual ceremony honoring law enforcement who were killed in the line of duty in the previous year, on May 15, 2013.

Has President Barack Obama not made his objections about the Internal Revenue Service’s handling of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status clear enough — as well as what he intends to do about it?

The White House is getting roundly criticized on both counts.

“I think the president made clear, based on news reports, his feelings about those reports and what he would expect if they turned out to be true,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said today. “It is entirely appropriate for a president… not to take action based on media reports, but to wait for the actual inspector general’s review to see what happened before moving forward.”

The IRS inspector general has reported: attributing the singling out of Tea Party-related groups for review of their tax status applications to administrative inefficiency. The Justice Department is investigating, to see if any laws were broken.

“The president is impatient with people who do not hold themselves to the standards that he believes employees of the federal government ought to hold themselves to,” Carney said. “He also believes it is important for him to wait for the facts before he acts, and that is what he has done here.”

Is the president as concerned about the Justice Department’s tracking of Associated Press reporters’ telephone records in an investigation of a leak of government information said to have national security implications as it is with the Internal Revenue Service’s conduct?

“What I can tell is that when there are criminal investigations undertaken by the Department of Justice, we do not have insight into or knowledge about them, and that is the way it should be,” Carney said, pointing to Attorney General Eric Holder’s statement that he expects that his deputy who authorized the phone-record tracking followed the guidelines for exhausting every other avenue in any inquiry before resorting to that. “The president is a strong believer in the First Amendment… He also has to be, as commander of chief and an American citizen” concerned about national security.

The White House has spoken with Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York about reintroducing a so-called shield law preventing the government from seizing information from news reporters. Obama “believes the media should have the protection that a shield law would allow,” Carney said.

As for the ongoing clash with Republicans in Congress over the fatal attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, Carney said: “This is political.”

“Republicans are fundraising off of it,” he said at the press briefing in the White House. “You have reports by your colleagues that the speaker of the House is obsessed with it.”

“It is absolutely political.”

Original post is Obama Thinks First, Acts Later: Carney by Political Capital.

Photograph by Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo

White House press secretary Jay Carney, rear, is seen on a television monitor during his daily news briefing at the White House.

In Washington, it’s often more the cover-up than the scandal that undoes a president.

“And when it’s over, we’ll be hard-pressed to remember how it began.”

So wrote Jay Carney, then a correspondent for Time magazine, in 2007, in the midst of the Bush administration’s growing second-term problems.

Carney now serves as press secretary for President Barack Obama as potentially disabling second-term crises have arisen on three fronts: The administration’s handling of the fatal attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya, the Internal Revenue Service’s handling of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status and the Justice Department’s surveillance of reporters’ telephone records in a case of purported national security.

The White House was at the center of only one of these matters — public communication about the Benghazi attack. The IRS and Justice Department brought the other problems to the White House’s doorstep — it appears, with the administration maintaining it knew nothing of either affair at the time it was conducted. Yet the White House stands front and center on the question of what might be done about apparent over-reaching of government police power — the Justice Department, on the receiving and giving end here, has opened a criminal investigation of the IRS. And Attorney General Eric Holder is on the Hill today.

The White House, many of its own allies are saying, has been slow to learning the lesson that, in crisis management, the management is often more important than the crisis. And, as Bloomberg and others are reporting this morning, the Obama White House needs an accelerated learning curve.

“There’s an industrial-scandal complex that exists in Washington, D.C.,” says Chris Lehane, a Democratic consultant who worked as a special assistant counsel to Clinton. “You need to have some kind of entity within the building that’s capable of managing these situations.”

The administration’s response “sounded exceedingly passive to me,” Robert Gibbs, Obama’s first press secretary, said in an interview on MSNBC. “The tenor of this briefing would be different if the president had spoken about this on Saturday or Sunday and not on Monday.”

As Carney himself put it, with Time co-author Massimo Calabresi, in 2007:

In Washington, scandals metastasize, growing and changing until we can’t remember what they were about in the beginning. A bungled burglary became a cancer on the presidency, forcing Richard Nixon to resign in disgrace. A money-losing Arkansas real estate deal led to Monica, a blue dress and Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Already, the furor over the dismissal of eight U.S. Attorneys has shifted focus from the crass but essentially routine exercise of political patronage to the essential project of George W. Bush’s presidency: its deliberate and aggressive efforts to expand and protect Executive power.

Which is why divining the true motives behind the dismissals is only part of the battle under way in Washington. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have spent six years expanding presidential powers at the expense of Congress and the judiciary, from authorizing domestic wiretapping to limiting habeas corpus and changing bills through signing statements. Democrats, in control of both chambers of Congress for the first time in 12 years, are determined to reclaim what they can. And the U.S. Attorneys case gives them powerful new ammunition.

Just getting Karl Rove and other top White House officials to testify could be as important as anything they might say, since it would set a precedent of sorts as Democrats push to investigate internal White House deliberations on everything from Iraq-war contracting to the use of prewar intelligence. Bush is resisting, offering to give only limited interviews with lawmakers with no transcript. Anything more than that, he says, would be an infringement on presidential privilege.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales remains a likely casualty, but the history of past scandals suggests his resignation would not be enough to end the current one. Hearings will be held, subpoenas issued, new investigations launched. And when it’s over, we’ll be hard-pressed to remember how it began.

Original post is Carney: ‘Scandals Metastasize’ — in the Industrial-Scandal Complex by Political Capital.

Photograph by Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. Photo by Carolyn Kaster / AP

The White House was asked this question today about the IRS probe of conservative nonprofit groups:

Can you say categorically that nobody at the White House and nobody on the president’s political team had any knowledge or was involved in any way in the targeting of tea party groups by the IRS?

“Yes,” replied Press Secretary Jay Carney.

Absolutely not?

“’Look, we found out about this — or at least the counsel’s office was notified about this investigation, this activity, potential activity — very broadly just a few weeks ago,” he said.

The IRS inspector general is investigating, he said, and the White House will have to wait for that to know  “what actions should be taken. And then decide on what next steps should be taken.”

There will be consequences, Carney said,  if allegations of targeting certain Tea Party groups for questions about their tax status abuse are upheld.

The president has “made clear that if the reports about the activity of IRS personnel prove to be true, he would find them outrageous and he would expect that appropriate action be taken and that people be held responsible,” Carney said. “He has no tolerance for targeting  of specific groups, conservative groups, if the reporting is true on this, and he would expect action to be taken.”

“At this point,” he said, “we have to, you know, wait for the action of an independent investigator, if you will, the inspector general, before we can jump to conclusions about what happened, whether there was a deliberate targeting of
groups inappropriately, and — and if that’s the case, what action should be taken.”

As for the Justice Department’s investigation of government leaks that resulted in the tracking of telephone records of reporters for the Associated Press, Carney said the president first learned of that yesterday — in the news.

“Let me just be clear,” he said. “We don’t have any independent knowledge of that. He found out about the news reports yesterday on the road.”

Original post is White House: No Role in IRS Tea Party Exam, AP Saga News to Them by Political Capital.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) building in Washington, D.C.

Written with Richard Rubin and Phil Mattingly

Attorney General Eric Holder said today that the Justice Department has opened an investigation of the IRS’s examination of conservative political organizations to see if any crimes were committed.

Yet he said he couldn’t speak to the facts of his own agency’s investigation of reporters, as he has recused himself from a probe of how government information was leaked to the press.

What is known so far about the Internal Revenue Service’s examination of political nonprofit groups doesn’t answer one main question — whether the U.S. tax agency’s actions were malicious or just inept.

IRS employees, trying to figure out how to sort through a urge in applications for nonprofit status, used shortcut phrases such as “Tea Party” and “patriot” to flag groups for crutiny, according to an inspector general’s timeline.

After IRS officials raised concerns in June 2011, there’s no evidence hat the agency started over with a new system.

That scrutiny was elevated to a scandal on May 10, when Lois Lerner, the director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division, acknowledged in remarks to a conference of tax lawyers that applications using those phrases had been singled out for extra examination. The filtering done by IRS employees in Cincinnati now imperils the agency’s ability to enforce the laws on politically active nonprofit groups.

Holder disclosed the Justice Department’s plans at a news conference today at which he faced questions about his own agency’s probe of reporters at the Associated Press in an investigation of leaked government information.

Yet Holder, who has recused himself from the leak investigation being conducted by the U.S. attorney’s office, said he couldn’t speak to the facts of that case. There is a standard that the Department of Justice requires — demanding that the agency exhaust all other alternatives in an inquiry before investigating the news media. He said he assumes that standard was met before the agency tracked AP reporters’ phone calls.

The decision to seek media phone records was made by Deputy Attorney General James Cole, Holder said.

Holder told reporters today in Washington that he recused himself “out of an abundance of caution” because he wanted to avoid “even the possibility” that the probe would be seen as not independent. Holder said he has frequent contact with the news media and was interviewed by the FBI last year as part of its investigation into unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

Read his letter to Associated Press CEO Gary B. Pruitt here.

Original post is Holder: Justice Investigating IRS by Political Capital.

Photograph by William Thomas Cain/Getty Images

Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA), standing onstage with his wife Susan and daughter Alex, concedes the Pennsylvania Senate race to Republican Pat Toomey November 3, 2010 at the Radnor Hotel in St. Davids, Pennsylvania.

Just six months have passed since the last election and 18 months remain until the next one in November 2014. Pennsylvania Democrat Joe Sestak already is planning for the election after that.

Sestak, a former House member who lost a Senate race in 2010, will prepare for a rematch against Republican incumbent Pat Toomey in a 2016 Senate election still 42 months away, Sestak said in a video today.

“The Senate needs a leader accountable only to we the people, not any other interest,” Sestak said in the three-minute video, which uses Independence Hall in Philadelphia as a backdrop.

“Together we can have an honest discussion about the issues and the challenges we face. We will hold our leaders and ourselves accountable to have a government of the people, by the people, for the people,” Sestak said as he announced what his website calls an “exploratory committee.”

Sestak raised $460,250 in the first three months of 2013, according to a report he filed last month with the Federal Election Commission. He may use those funds for a Senate campaign.

Toomey beat Sestak in 2010, a good Republican year, by 51 percent to 49 percent after Sestak beat party-switching Sen. Arlen Specter in the Democratic primary.

Toomey is a former president of the Club for Growth, a group that promotes free trade and supports slashing government spending and taxes, though he’s attracted attention recently as a co-sponsor of an amendment that would have expanded the background check system for firearm purchasers. Toomey was one of four Republicans who supported the amendment, which failed to win the requisite 60 votes last month.

Original post is Sestak Eyes Pennsylvania Comeback — in 2016 by Political Capital.

Original post is Holder: Critics of Federal Court Terrorist Prosecution ‘Simply Wrong’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo

Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., waves as she ends her speech at the 40th annual Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., on March 15, 2013.

Written with Jonathan Salant

Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire says opponents “can’t bully me into changing my vote” on background checks for gun buyers.

The opponents in this case, she says, are New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Barack Obama. The mayor, co-founder of Bloomberg LP, parent company of Bloomberg News, is among the mayors in Mayors Against Illegal Guns who announced a new TV ad this week targeting Ayotte for her vote against the background check bill that died in the Senate for lack of 60 votes.

In doing so, the mayors say, Ayotte voted against the 89 percent of New Hampshire voters who support the measure. Ayotte has been singled out more than any of the other Republican opponents of the measure because of where she lives, a swing state that is sympathetic to Democratic causes.

Ayotte says the legislation she opposed, which would require purchasers at gun shows and over the Internet to undergo the same criminal background checks as those buying weapons from licensed firearm dealers, would do “nothing to prevent a deranged individual from obtaining and misusing firearms to commit horrific tragedies like the one in Newtown.”

Original post is Ayotte in Crossfire: ‘Can’t Bully Me’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Mel Evans/AP Photo

Inmates, left, and former Gov. Jim McGreevey, right, laugh as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, second right, makes a joke while answering a question at the Hudson County Correctional Center in Kearny, N.J., on May 8, 2013.

One reporter likened them to “The Odd Couple,” the Neil Simon creation about male roommates with opposite personalities.

The setting today, though, wasn’t that pair’s roomy Manhattan apartment. It was a women’s unit at the Hudson County Correctional Center in Kearny, New Jersey. The stars were Republican Gov. Chris Christie and one of his predecessors, the Democrat Jim McGreevey.

There they sat, the sassy, hard-charging and secretly Lap-Banded Christie (more about that in a sec) and McGreevey, 55, who resigned in disgrace in 2004 after declaring himself a “gay American” disclosing an extramarital affair with an aide. Their mission: extoll the virtues of rehabilitating nonviolent drug offenders at the Integrity House recovery program led by McGreevey.

Christie, speaking to reporters, said he was “absolutely not” uncomfortable alongside McGreevey, whose party he has criticized for shepherding New Jersey’s fiscal morass. He said he’s even had conversations with McGreevey on establishing “drug courts,” which emphasize substance-abuse treatment over punishment.

McGreevey, who led the 26 women through song, personal stories and recitation of the Serenity Prayer, said the group was “blessed to have the governor here.”

Christie, 50, has struggled with his weight since he stopped playing sports in school. His cheeks and chin aren’t as full as they were just a few weeks ago, and he told the New York Post on May 6 that he had secretly undergone the Lap Band procedure of gastric banding surgery in February. At a news conference in Newark yesterday, he said he had kept the matter quiet because he considered it personal, to the extent that he had registered under a fake name at New York University Langone Medical Center’s Weight Management Program.

He declined yesterday to say how much he had weighed and lost. Any reporter hoping to break the big news today was disappointed. Christie took just two questions unrelated to the recovery program. Neither involved his tummy.

Original post is New Jersey’s Odd Couple Governors Visit Correctional Center by Political Capital.