{"id":1507438,"date":"2024-12-12T00:15:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-12T05:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1507438"},"modified":"2024-12-12T00:15:00","modified_gmt":"2024-12-12T05:15:00","slug":"the-wild-world-of-democratic-ethics-defeated-representative-accused-of-gaetz-leak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/the-wild-world-of-democratic-ethics-defeated-representative-accused-of-gaetz-leak\/1507438\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wild World Of Democratic Ethics: Defeated Representative Accused Of Gaetz Leak"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Wild World Of Democratic Ethics: Defeated Representative Accused Of Gaetz Leak<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Jonathan Turley,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cYou must be wary of those seeking to use their influence and their expertise to wrongful ends.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Those words were spoken at the George Washington Law School commencement ceremony two years ago by the recently defeated Rep. Susan Wild (D., Pa.).<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

This week, the words took on a new meaning after Wild was accused of leaking information from the House Ethics Committee. <\/strong>Wild embodies a party that is in an ethical and political free fall this month.<\/p>\n

\u00a0If news reports are accurate<\/a>, Wild appears to have given our students a curious ethical lesson in how not to be a lawyer or legislator.<\/p>\n

Wild was fighting to release the report of the\u00a0investigation into former Rep.\u00a0Matt Gaetz\u00a0<\/a>(R., Fla.).<\/p>\n

When Gaetz decided to withdraw from Congress, the report was not released. That is when details from the committee were leaked to the media, and the press\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0that \u201ctwo sources said Wild ultimately acknowledged to the panel that she had leaked information.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Keep in mind that this is the House\u00a0Ethics\u00a0<\/em>Committee, and she is a member. She is also a member of Congress who took an oath as part of the\u00a0panel\u2019s rules<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cI do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will not disclose, to any person or entity outside the Committee on Ethics, any information received in the course of my service with the Committee, except as authorized by the Committee or in accordance with its rules.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wild herself\u00a0has not publicly confirmed or denied the alleged leaking of the\u00a0information.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If the reports are true, Wild knowingly violated an oath that she took not to release information from the Ethics Committee because she was unhappy with losing votes on the release of information.<\/p>\n

Her office seems to have shrugged off media inquiries.<\/p>\n

As in the past controversy, Wild has avoided public comment on the report that she was the leaker.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This controversy speaks to more than one unethical former representative. This month, we have seen Democrats line up to support one of the most unethical and abusive uses of presidential pardon power in history. President Biden not only pardoned his son but pardoned him for any crimes over a decade, including some that many felt implicated President Biden himself.<\/p>\n

The President issued the pardon after repeatedly lying to the public when he was a candidate that he would never do so. In the previous election, Biden lied to the public about not having met Hunter Biden\u2019s clients or having knowledge of his dealings in the influence-peddling scandal.<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s lack of ethics surprised no one.<\/strong> However, even today, the support that he received from Democratic leaders over the pardon has been shocking. Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), chairman of the\u00a0Senate<\/a>\u00a0Judiciary Committee and Senate majority whip, even called it a \u201clabor of love<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, much of the corruption in Washington is a labor of love, from nepotism to influence peddling to corrupt pardons. Indeed, faced with overwhelming opposition of the public to the Biden pardon, Democratic members look like the comical choreography of \u201cPrisoners of Love<\/a>\u201d from the movie\u00a0The Producers<\/em>. (\u201cOh, you can lock us up and lose the key; But hearts in love are always free!\u201d).<\/p>\n

The distorted view of ethics in the Democratic Party was vividly on display during an\u00a0embarrassing moment<\/a>\u00a0recently at the White House when Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that a poll showed \u201c64% of the American people agree with the pardon \u2014 64% of the American people. So, we get a sense of where the American people are on this.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

That poll actually showed the majority of Americans opposed the pardon.<\/p>\n

Yet, it was 64 percent of Democrats who favored a president giving his own son a pardon.<\/p>\n

It is all about the ends rather than the means in today\u2019s politics of rage.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The 2022 words of Wild were particularly poignant because they were used as part of a false attack made by Wild at my own school. In a speech to the law students on living an ethical life as a lawyer, Wild accused me of testifying falsely in the Trump impeachment that only criminal acts are impeachable after saying the opposite in my testimony in the Clinton impeachment.<\/p>\n

The only problem is that Wild\u2019s statement was\u00a0demonstrably and undeniably false<\/a>.<\/strong> I testified in both the Clinton and Trump impeachments that an impeachable offense need not be an actual crime.\u00a0 Ironically, Wild\u2019s own Democratic colleagues and later the House managers in the Senate Trump trial repeatedly cited my testimony on that very point.<\/p>\n

None of this matters in the Wild world of Democratic ethics. It is very simple. Whatever Democrats are attempting cannot be \u201cwrongful ends.\u201d More importantly, it is the ends, not the means, that are the measure of ethics. Since they are only fighting for what is right, the ends justify the means from\u00a0cleansing ballots of Republicans<\/a>\u00a0(including Trump) to supporting a\u00a0massive censorship system<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0ignoring court decisions to count invalid votes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is the same sense of ethics that led someone at the Supreme Court to leak a draft of the Dobbs decision. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Even though the leak shattered court ethical rules and traditions, the leaker was lionized by many on the left.<\/p>\n

For years, the \u201cby any means necessary<\/a>\u201d wing has dominated the Democratic Party.<\/strong> Ironically, the collapsing of the party\u2019s credibility with the public has left little to show beyond a litany of unethical means used to achieve unrealized ends.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n

Jonathan Turley\u00a0is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of \u201cThe Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage<\/a>.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nWed, 12\/11\/2024 – 19:15<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/political\/wild-world-democratic-ethics-defeated-representative-accused-gaetz-leak<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Wild World Of Democratic Ethics: Defeated Representative Accused Of Gaetz Leak Authored by Jonathan Turley, \u201cYou must be wary of those seeking to use…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1507439,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1507438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1507438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1507438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1507438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1507439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1507438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1507438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1507438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}