No, I'm not talking about Eric Cantor. And I'm not talking about Cory Gardner, either.
Tonight's diary award winner is blowhard Texas Representative Steve Stockman. Stockman challenged Sen. Jon Cornyn in his state's primary and lost, which means that – fortunately – he won't be haunting the halls of Congress next year.
But today we get news that the Office of Congressional Ethics has found Stockman illegally received donations from his Congressional staff and then made a (poor) attempt to cover it up.
How poor?
Apparently each of the two staffers had parents who decided – on the same night – to donate $7500 apiece to Stockman's campaigns (he was running three campaigns, so he had three times the normal $2500 limit). When OCE investigated, the parents could not remember making those donations, so…
Stockman's campaign filed an amended report stating that the donations came directly from his staffers. But Federal employees are forbidden by law from donating to their employers, so…
10 months after the date of the donations, Stockman filed employment papers with the Congressional employment office stating that his two staffers quit the day of the donation – of course before the TIME of the donation – but then decided to come back to work the next day.
Yep. Nothing to see here, folks. Move on…
FYI: The Office of Congressional Ethics is a research panel; on its own it has no power. For that, it has recommended that the House Ethics Committee (largely known as the most stalemated committee in Congress) take up the investigation based on OCE's findings.
The FBI could also interest itself based on the now public findings, and it seems like there's a significant amount of shenanigans here to prosecute.