Hanging with the impeached crowd

I guess that if your husband has been impeached, it's no big deal to add one more impeached fellow to your campaign. Hillary Clinton just named Alcee Hastings as one of her two national Campaign Co-Chairs. Hastings is a former US District Court Judge, appointed by Jimmy Carter. He was impeached in 1988 and convicted by the Senate in 1989 for conspiracy concerning charges related to bribery and perjury. And this was not some right-wing conspiracy to get Hastings. Those voting to impeach Hastings included Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, John Conyers and Charles Rangel. Of course, Nancy Pelosi got over it and publicly considered Hastings to chair the House Intelligence Committee but bowed to disgusted uproar over that idea. Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post chided Pelosi for considering this choice and reminded us of some of the details of Hastings' case.

But as someone who covered his impeachment and Senate trial, I can't get past the facts of the case, which convince me that Hastings did indeed agree to conspire with a close friend, a prominent Washington lawyer named William A. Borders Jr., to solicit the bribe. Borders was convicted of the bribery scheme in a separate trial, and he served additional time for contempt rather than testify in the congressional proceedings.

The evidence against Hastings is circumstantial, but it's too much to explain away: a suspicious pattern of telephone calls between Hastings and Borders at key moments in the case; Borders's apparent insider knowledge of developments in the criminal case; Hastings's appearance at a Miami hotel, as promised by Borders as a signal that the judge had agreed to the payoff; a cryptic telephone conversation between the two men that appears to be a coded discussion of the bribe arrangement.

Consider: Hastings, a federal judge, gets word from Borders's lawyer that Borders has been arrested for conspiring to bribe him and that the FBI wants to interview him. Instead of calling the FBI agents whose names and numbers he's been given, Hastings leaves his hotel without checking out and heads to the airport outside Baltimore instead of National, where there's an earlier flight. At BWI, Hastings calls his girlfriend, has her call him back at a different pay phone, then asks her to leave the house to call him from a pay phone, then calls her back from a different pay phone. He doesn't speak to the FBI until they track him down at the girlfriend's house later that night.

Speaker-in-waiting Pelosi: This is not the behavior of an innocent man -- or of an intelligence committee chairman.

But apparently, Hillary is comfortable with his being one of the public faces of her campaign. She's been known not to think too much of impeachment so what is one more impeached guy in her campaign?
(link via Real Clear Politics)