Taibbi: Grayson, 'who went werewolf on me now spooks Fed officials'

[seafan]

Congressman who went werewolf on me now spooks Fed officials


By Matt Taibbi
September 25, 2009

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Alan Grayson, Bernie Sanders, Ron Paul and others keep hammering away at this whole Fed-secrecy issue, and every now and then we get some pretty interesting exchanges. Zero Hedge relates this one between Grayson and Fed counsel Scott Alvarez. It’s becoming abundantly clear that at some point we’re going to start to hear details about monstrous front-running operations involving the major banks on Wall Street.

Matt: "I recommend that everyone watch this clip just for the sheer entertainment value..."

Alan Grayson: I would like to know whether it is within the Federal Reserve’s legal authority to try to manipulate the stock market or the futures market.

Federal Reserve GC Scott Alvarez: I don’t believe the Federal Reserve tries to manipulate the stock market…(Yoda: Do or do not, there is no try.)

Alan Grayson: Does the Federal Reserve actually possess all the gold that’s listed on their balance sheet.

Scott Alvarez, doing a classic poker body language tell, and taking his time: Yes…

Alan Grayson: Who actually executes the trades for the Federal Reserve in the markets?

Scott Alvarez: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which executes trades through Primary Dealers.

Alan Grayson: Can you name one Primary Dealer?

Scott Alvarez: JP Morgan Chase

Alan Grayson: Do you mind if we have a GAO audit to see if there has been front-running or insider trading by them? Do you mind? Is that ok with you?

Scott Alvarez: I am not sure if I have that authority…

via “Have The Federal Reserve Or Prime Brokers Ever Tried To Manipulate The Stock Market?” | zero hedge.

Taibbi continues:

I have personal experience with… well, let’s call it the unique personality of Alan Grayson. In his capacity as an attorney he once basically threatened to have me dismembered and have my body parts dumped in a tin canister and fired into the center of a burning supernova. And that’s actually underselling the real language he used. We were having a disagreement about the use of information given to me by a certain source in a story about military contracting, and in the middle of what had been a normal contentious argument between two sane adults, dude suddenly assumed this crazy monster-voice and just went medieval on me. He was roaring into the telephone about how he was going to crush me, how I was going to wish I had never messed with him, how I didn’t know who the hell I was dealing with, and so on. One phrase I remember in particular was, “I am going to strip the bark off of you!” It came totally out of the blue and it was like being on the telephone with a metamorphosing werewolf — the whole performance genuinely freaked me out. I may even have peed a little, I can’t remember.

((((:rofl:))))

When I heard Alan Grayson was running for Congress, I remember thinking to myself, That Alan Grayson? The lunatic? It can’t be, I thought. I kept imagining trails of half-eaten sheep leading to his campaign appearances. But it turned out to be true. And when I checked, his platform turned out to be quite sane and even kind of interesting. Then he got elected and I suddenly started seeing his name attached to all of these calls for transparency, various crusades for FinReg reforms, etc.

And now every time I see Alan Grayson, he’s tearing some freaked-out bureaucrat a new asshole in the middle of some empty conference room in the Capitol somewhere. I see the looks on the faces of these poor souls and I know exactly what they’re going through. Which is just hilarious, frankly. Especially since these people all tend to deserve it, like this nebbishy little creep Alvarez quite obviously does.

Now for most of last year Grayson’s public appearances didn’t rate any higher than a five or maybe a six on the craziness scale, but he’s a definite seven in this clip, trending toward eight. Watch Alvarez look around nervously, like he’s not sure whether to say something about how out of control Grayson is. He’s looking around like he expects someone to come out with a butterfly net and capture Grayson, so he can get back to lunch. But no help comes. Very entertaining stuff.

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From the comments section on this story, poster toojaded writes:

This was like watching a cat playing with its prey before eating it. At the final moment the cat’s owner hit the can opener (time’s up) and the prey was set loose. “We will meet again, my friend.”, promised the cat with a wink and a toothy smile.

The disconcerting thing about Grayson is the mouth is smiling but the eyes are saying, “I could snap your neck like a toothpick, you dissembling little turd.” Loved it even though I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end. I’d be paranoid for years.

As for the description of Grayson, I laughed so hard I might have peed a little. Bravo!

I, for one, appreciate Matt Taibbi's turn of a phrase when it's liberally sprinkled into some top-notch investigative reporting.


Good on ya, Matt. Looking forward to what's around the next curve ahead.




And, by the way, Alan Grayson is, and will continue to be a very important part of unraveling the massive corruption orchestrated by KBR and their accomplices in DOJ, directed by George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney.


For background on Grayson's extensive work on exposing government-contractor fraud, which exploded during the Bush years, the following piece from Vanity Fair is a must read:




The People vs. the Profiteers, November, 2007



So help them, God: Anti-fraud crusader Alan Grayson.
(Photograph by Gasper Tringale.)


2007

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In his functional home-office in Orlando, and at the Beltway headquarters of his law firm, Grayson & Kubli, Grayson spends most of his days and many of his evenings on a lonely legal campaign to redress colossal frauds against American taxpayers by private contractors operating in Iraq. He calls it “the crime of the century.”

His obvious adversaries are the contracting corporations themselves—especially Halliburton, the giant oil-services conglomerate where Vice President Dick Cheney spent the latter half of the 1990s as C.E.O., and its former subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, now known simply as KBR. But he says his efforts to take on those organizations have earned him another enemy: the United States Department of Justice.

Over the past 16 years, Grayson has litigated dozens of cases of contractor fraud. In many of these, he has found the Justice Department to be an ally in exposing wrongdoing. But in cases that involve the Iraq war, the D.O.J. has taken extraordinary steps to stand in his way. Behind its machinations, he believes, is a scandal of epic proportions—one that may come to haunt the legacy of the Bush administration long after it is gone.

Consider the case of Grayson’s client Bud Conyers, a big, bearded 43-year-old who lives with his ex-wife and her nine children, four of them his, in Enid, Oklahoma. Conyers worked in Iraq as a driver for Kellogg, Brown & Root. Spun off by Halliburton as an independent concern in April, KBR is the world’s fifth-largest construction company. Before the war started, the Pentagon awarded it two huge contracts: one, now terminated, to restore the Iraqi oil industry, and another, still in effect, to provide a wide array of logistical-support services to the U.S. military.

In the midday heat of June 16, 2003, Conyers was summoned to fix a broken refrigerated truck—a “reefer,” in contractor parlance—at Log Base Seitz, on the edge of Baghdad’s airport. He and his colleagues had barely begun to inspect the sealed trailer when they found themselves reeling from a nauseating stench. The freezer was powered by the engine, and only after they got it running again, several hours later, did they dare open the doors.

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Former KBR driver Bud Conyers’s photo of a truck carrying beverage ice less than a month after it hauled rotting corpses.

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In 1984, he got a job as a clerk for the D.C. federal appeals court, where he worked for future Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The following year, he joined Ginsburg’s husband, Marty, at his renowned Washington law firm, Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson. “There,” Grayson says, “I learned the smallest details of the law that applies to government contracting.” The Federal Acquisition Regulation, 600 small-type pages of rules governing every aspect of commercial relationships between the U.S. government and private business, became his bible.

A cynic might argue that Grayson is hoping for political dividends from his Iraq-fraud campaign. He mounted a run for Congress last year (2006) in his local Florida district and, after joining the race very late, came within 2,000 votes of winning the Democratic primary. But he maintains that his emergence as a whistle-blowers’ white knight was anything but calculated.

He had, he says, handled a “trickle” of qui tam cases for years, representing both whistle-blowers and contractors. Many of those cases were swiftly adopted by the D.O.J. But when the Bush administration came to power and the “war on terror” began, he quickly came to realize that the scale of fraud spawned in its wake was of a different order of magnitude. More and more would-be plaintiffs began to contact his firm after hearing about it on the informal whistle-blowers’ grapevine or through nonprofit organizations such as Taxpayers Against Fraud and the Project on Government Oversight, both based in D.C. “I certainly could be doing a lot of different things in my life,” says Grayson. “It’s possible that when all is said and done on these cases I will have lost a substantial amount of money. I’m O.K. with that. Some things you do because they’re really worthwhile and important.”

It is perfectly normal, Grayson says, for the D.O.J. to seek to extend the seal on a qui tam suit for 6 or 12 months while it carries out investigations. But with many of the Iraq cases it has gone back to court time and again, successfully asking judges for extension after extension. As a result, even many suits first filed in 2003 and 2004 remain entirely secret.

“What you have here is a uniform practice that goes across an entire class of cases, something I’ve never seen before,” says Grayson. “They’re being treated in a fundamentally different way from normal cases that don’t involve fraud in Iraq. They’re being bottled up indefinitely.”

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Given that the same lawyers who are suppressing the Iraq cases continue to be cooperative on other matters, Grayson suspects that they are following orders from on high. Would it be so outlandish, he wonders, to suggest that the same Justice Department that has been accused of firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons might be suppressing war-related fraud claims for political purposes?

One such purpose might be to shield from view the monumental scale of U.S. military contracting in Iraq and elsewhere, and the size of the flaws associated with it. The Department of Defense is easily the biggest federal agency, with a budget that has ballooned more than 90 percent since 2000, to about $460 billion this year. Much of that increase has been spent on private contracting, which rose from $106 billion in 2000 to $297 billion in 2006.

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At the same time, the Bush administration has special sensitivities to claims concerning KBR and its former parent company, Halliburton. Dick Cheney’s deep connection with the firm is well established. It is less widely known that former attorney general Alberto Gonzales, the Cabinet member who headed the Justice Department until August, when he was forced to resign, also has long-standing links with both Halliburton and its legal counsel, the venerable Texas firm of Vinson & Elkins.

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“In my mind, one of the basic reasons, maybe even the basic reason, why the war has gone badly is war profiteering,” says Grayson. “You could say that the only people who have benefited from the invasion of Iraq are al-Qaeda, Iran, and Halliburton. America has spent so much money that we literally could have hired every single adult Iraqi and it would have cost less than what it has cost to conduct this war through U.S. military forces and contractors.”

In Grayson’s view, a nightmare combination of jacked-up bids, waste, kickbacks, and inflated subcontracts means that as much as half the value of every contract he has seen “ends up being fraudulent in one way or another.” He adds, “Cumulatively, the amount that’s been spent on contractors in the four-plus years of the war is now over $100 billion. Pick any number between 10 percent and 50 percent—I don’t think you can seriously argue that the scale of the fraud is less than 10 percent. Either way, you’re talking cumulatively about something between $10 and $50 billion.”

Indeed, in February, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform got the news from Pentagon auditors that contractors in Iraq had claimed at least $10 billion—three times more than previous official estimates—in expenditures that were either unreasonably high or unsupported by proper documentation. Of this amount, $2.7 billion had been billed to the government by KBR.

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In the early years of his career, Alan Grayson spent most of his time representing military contractors. “It was the most heavily regulated business in existence anywhere in the world, and the result of that was that it was clean,” he says. “There was a tremendous bureaucracy that existed to make sure that contractors stuck to the rules, and also to punish those who did not stick to the rules very severely.” In one famous case, he recalls, a uniform manufacturer that had made hundreds of thousands of military garments was investigated because he asked his workers to sew one dress as a gift for his daughter.

Today, such stringency is unthinkable. “What has happened is a systematic dismantling of the protections that kept the system honest,” says Grayson. Between 1991 and 2005, the size of the staff responsible for managing and auditing Pentagon contracts was cut in half.

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The D.O.J.’s stifling of fraud claims against the big contracting companies is all the more curious in light of its willingness to prosecute individuals for offenses including bribery and embezzlement. Eight people who worked under logcap are being investigated for such crimes. Two employees of a KBR subcontractor have already pled guilty. In a separate case, a former KBR employee pled guilty in July to participating in a kickback scheme. In August 2007, Bowen reportedly promised that a new task force drawn from several government departments was escalating the fight against fraud and corruption, which he labeled the “second insurgency.”

Grayson says that the crackdown on individuals “creates an illusion of activity, but so far they’ve done nothing against firms such as KBR.” When it comes to qui tam cases, he adds, the government isn’t just hiding the complaints from view; it also appears to be neglecting its obligation to investigate their claims.

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False Claims Act suits could help to remedy these deficiencies, if only the Department of Justice weren’t suppressing them. One day, though, the seals on the complaints will have to be lifted. “I wish I could tell you about the ones that are under seal,” says Grayson, “because some of them really are time bombs. They’re literally burying these cases to keep the public from finding out about them, and to keep anything from being done on them. But it is a time bomb, because any normal amount of attention on these cases would result in massive amounts of money being recovered for the taxpayers.”

There are a few encouraging signs that a day of reckoning is drawing near. Committees in both the House and the Senate have held hearings on contracting in Iraq, and several plan to hold more. Patrick Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, has introduced a War Profiteering Prevention Act, which would make it much easier to investigate corrupt contractors and call them to account. And in August, the news that tens of thousands of weapons intended for Iraqi security forces had vanished or been stolen prompted the Pentagon to announce that its inspector general, Claude M. Kicklighter, would lead an 18-person team to investigate “contracting practices” in Iraq.

In the more distant future, a Democratic administration might open up the vaults and expose the American public to the scale of what has been looted. “What we have seen up to now is the worst of the worst in terms of a deliberate cover-up,” Grayson says. But if and when it comes to an end, he thinks it’s entirely possible that Congress will appoint a special prosecutor—one whose targets might one day reach “an extremely high level.”

'The wheels of justice grind slowly but exceedingly fine....'






Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) intends to make it happen.

[Selatius]

1. He reminds me of the fictional District Attorney Harvey Dent.

Not that that is a bad thing. We need good people who are willing to call out the bullshit.

[Nikki Stone1]

2. FED council Alvarez is a weasle. :)

:)

[Control-Z]

4. He looks like one too. lol. n/t

[Control-Z]

3. While your OP seemed somewhat

long and convoluted, I'm glad I bothered to follow your links for the full Alan Grayson experience. I really enjoyed it, especially the video clip. Thanks.

[Liberal_in_LA]

5. agreed.

[jgraz]

6. Can we please keep Grayson away from small planes

and high-end hookers?

[tblue37]

7. It looks like Alan Grayson was interrogating Dick Smothers! nt