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As mentioned earlier, Bill Lynn, President Obama’s deputy defense secretary-designate, is coming back to the Pentagon from defense-contractor giant Raytheon, where he was top lobbyist. But wait! Didn’t Obama just yesterday put out an executive order barring officials from entering his government for two years after they’ve stopped lobbying on issues relevant to their government service?
Sure enough, here comes a statement from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee:
"Given the President’s new stricter rules requiring his appointees to recuse themselves from matters or issues on which they have lobbied, the Senate Armed Services Committee will need further information before proceeding with the nomination of William J. Lynn III to be Deputy Secretary of Defense. The committee will await the administration’s assessment as to whether the new rules will preclude Mr. Lynn, who was a registered lobbyist for a defense contractor, from participating in key Department of Defense decisions, and if so, whether a waiver will be forthcoming and what the scope of the waiver will be."
At the risk of prediction, it’s hard to see how Bill Lynn can be deputy secretary now. I hold in my left hand the one-sheet biography that the Obama defense team passed out at last week’s confirmation hearings for Lynn: "Mr. Lynn currently serves as senior vice president for Government Operations and Strategy at Raytheon Company. In that position, he leads the company’s strategic planning and oversees the government relations activity." That’s lobbying. If Obama somehow redefines lobbying to exclude overseeing "government relations activity" so as to preserve Lynn’s nomination, it would be transparently cynical.
My guess is that someone on the Obama team in charge of the executive order didn’t sufficiently communicate with the Pentagon. This is an embarrassing blunder. Richard Danzig FTW?
Update: Or maybe not. This, from Robert Gibbs, is some bullshit: "Our waiver provisions are designed to allow uniquely qualified individuals like Bill Corr and Bill Lynn to serve the public interest in these critical times." So you can’t serve and lobby but the number two guy at the Pentagon can?
Crossposted to The Streak.
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Ackerman
There are waivers included in the order.
Check out the convo we had/are having about it at Swampland.
http://swampland.blogs.time.co…..ics-rules/
Cynically, I might believe one nomination was made, only to be put in jeopardy and forsaken, just to prove Obama is serious about these new rules.
Waiver, schmaiver.
Wow, that is some serious bullshit!
In the words of Joe E Brown, “Nobody’s perfect.”
He certainly tripped on his dick on this one. He’s going to have to back down.
Is it really though? Lets think this through for a minute. The Obama team didn’t have to implement ANY of those prohibitions on lobbyist. No previous President ever did. So he lets two people slide because supposedly they are uniquely qualified for their new positions. I really am not that outraged. I would be a lot more pissed if there were waivers to the rule about lobbying the White House AFTER they leave but there doesn’t appear to be any.
Whether you’re outraged or not, he can’t do it. Once is an exception, twice is stupidity. He’s got to say sorry and let it go or he’s pissing on his own tent.
I think I’d strongly prefer to see this administration follow their own rules, even when it’s inconvenient, rather than adopt the previous administration’s cynical “compliance when convenient” policy.
Finding another Deputy Defense Secretary will be orders of magnitude easier than trying to justify violating a rule you only just signed YESTERDAY.
I guess when we all said “we’ll see”, we didn’t expect to “see” this quickly…
mikey
Uhmmm the waiver in the executive order CLEARLY says he can. You might have a problem with that but it is what it is.
Sorry not to be clear. Of course he can.
I mean to say that it’s a ruinously stupid idea to try to move forward with this nomination.
CQ Politics explained this all yesterday:
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmsp…..0003014319
I’m less concerned about Lynn specifically than the reasoning given in the EO. Under section 3(b) the waiver encompasses:
That’s a loophole you can drive a Stryker through. “National security or the economy”? That boils down to “whatever I feel like.” No deputy defense secretary in history has ever turned out to be so crucial to national security. In effect this just blesses the same old revolving door policy to the defense industry that’s been in place forever. Why bother issuing this order at all if you’re going to leave that door open?
Maybe because it applies to more than just the defense department would be my guess. And again the one thing that it still does close is the area of someone leaving an office in the administration and then turning around and lobbying the White House. So that would be two reasons, I am sure there could be more.
Yes, what’s the point if you announce a major policy and then say it doesn’t apply to the No. 2 guy at the Pentagon? And the idea that Lynn can magically separate himself from his Raytheon connections in his decision making is laughable.
If any dept should NOT be allowed a “waiver” it is in DoD.
Come on, Obama.
Hope springs eternal. maybe bill lynn nomination is going to be the “I mean what I say” moment for BO and Lynn goes away to set the example?
Isn’t it rather ironic that the Repugs blew the whistle…? Anyways, Corr is deserving of the ‘waiver’, however, Lynn is uttterly unacceptable… I’ve dealt with Raytheon for years with the Patriot missile systems and others…
Let’s hope the right wingers run with this information too!
They are ALL the same in general, but with different slants on the SOS…only in the extreme matters does it show up as to whether it is right-wing or left-wing…they are both wings of the same political vehicle with blurred lines all the way from one side to the other.
Politics is a game machine that controls people and money. They blow with the wind and do the major things that the serfs want, because they need the serfs to do the work..the real physical work that makes their money work…they issue waivers when they need to and they do what the hell they want to get the goal met…money, money, money…and that which is good for the Powers that Be…Mo’ Money….and the POB never get caught or exposed or held accountable, because anyone that points to them is called a conspiracy theorist….or disappears in a small plane crash. Period.
Oh yeah, BTW, Caroline Kennedy did not back down from pursuit of the NY Senate seat….Ms. Caroline Schlossberg did. This has been pissing me off for weeks. She is not Caroline Kennedy…or Mrs. Kennedy, as she has constantly been referred to. Ms. Schlossberg declined to continue to pursue the Senate seat due to personal reasons. Period.
And, had she been appointed, she would have been “Senator Schlossberg” from New York. Just sayin’…had to get it off my chest…not that I care whether she was appointed or not…
Dugg
This post appears to be the same as “Bill Lynn’s Bio Bumps into Barack Obama’s Ethics,” posted at the top of the page on FDL. How confusing.
It is the front page post.
Obama should be consistent or explicky why he’s not being. Clearly.
What we do not need is HYPOCRACY with a D after it.
Citizen sghiteinfla:
Don’t feed the trolls.
The stand up thing for Obi to do is withdraw the nomination and find someone else who meets the standard.
Let’s play by the rules, especially the ones he made. What’s fair is fair.
No lobbyists and no revolving door. END OF STORY.
There is no emergency such that another person can not fill this position.
In fact, it might be a helluva lot better to put someone in there who has NOTHING to do with defense at all.
These defense types see danger lurking wherever they look. They are NOT going to put themselves, their department or their industry out of business. Therefore they are precisely the wrong types to run the DOD. When you’re a hammer, everything you look at appears to be a nail.
I really really hope he reconsiders…. They need to follow their own rules geez, they already gave one waiver.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but it really should be based on facts and not just on speculation as to what is “bullshit” and what isn’t. I know Bill Lynn personally and he is a man of integrity, a distinguished and experienced defense analyst, and a progressive who will keep the interests of the taxpayers as his top priority over any personal interest or prior corporate connection. His few months of working for a defense contractor should not disqualify him for this position, and because of his long prior record as a progressive defense analyst he is exactly the kind of public servant that the waivers in the Executive Order are designed for. You really ought to get to know someone, or at least something about them, before judging them so harshly.
You know I find it very funny that no matter what Obama does for the good people on certain “progressive” sites go out of there way to find the one thing about it that’s bad and blow it up. This was mentioned on Rachel Maddow at least a week ago and I find the timing of this post very nefarious. Could it be that maybe the simple explanation is that it’s hard to find people in national politics who are not lobbyists? I didn’t know everybody was such a purity troll.
New York City cops, they ain’t too smart.
Dear FireDogLake folks,
I worked for the campaign, and created a Facebook group today called “Obama Supporters For Enforcing The Ban On Hiring Lobbyists”. Check it out if you want to bring this issue to Facebook. To me, this is a great chance for us to feel things out in terms of administration responsiveness.