More Murtha

While it looks like Murtha won't win the Majority Leader position, it's still interesting to note the muck the TPM is raking up about John from Roll Call:

Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) told a group of Democratic moderates on Tuesday that an ethics and lobbying reform bill being pushed by party leaders was “total crap,” but said that he would work to enact the legislation because Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) supports it.

Murtha and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) are locked in a battle for the House Majority Leader post, and both men made presentations for to the Blue Dog Coalition on Tuesday in a bid for their votes.

“Even though I think it’s total crap, I’ll vote for it and pass it because that’s what Nancy wants,” Murtha told the Blue Dogs, according to three sources who were at the meeting. . . .

Murtha office’s did not comment for for this article.

And TPM digs this up from the ABSCAM annals:

ABSCAM was the media's name for an FBI undercover operation to catch corrupt lawmakers. Around 1980, agents and an informant met with several lawmakers posing as representatives of a fictional "sheik Abdul" to offer them $50,000 in cash for legislative favors. Murtha was one of the lawmakers who met with them.

Ultimately, six lawmakers went down on corruption charges stemming from the operation, nearly all of them Democrats. Murtha wasn't one of them -- but not, as Murtha implies, because his innocence was ever demonstrated.

[...]

With comments like that, and a zealous special prosecutor for the House ethics committee examining the evidence, how did Murtha avoid even a slap on the wrist? Easy: he was protected from even becoming the subject of investigation by Democratic leadership at the time.

In 1980, Tip O'Neill was House Speaker and the center of Democratic power in Washington, George Crile wrote in his book, "Charlie Wilson's War." Murtha was a member of O'Neill's inner circle.

When O'Neill learned that the special prosecutor, Barrett Prettyman Jr., had set his sights on Murtha, "the Speaker immediately summoned [then-Texas Dem. congressman] Charlie Wilson into his office with an offer he couldn't refuse" -- a seat on the House ethics committee.

[...]

"[S]hortly after Charlie's arrival the rules of the game changed completely and before [special prosecutor] Prettyman could fully deploy his investigators to move on the Murtha case, he was informed that the committee had concluded there was no justification for an investigation. 'This matter is closed,' proclaimed the newly appointed Ethics Committee chairman Louis Stokes, another of the Speaker's reliables."

Prettyman was stunned, Crile said, and resigned his congressional post in protest. Murtha kept his -- and, come Thursday's secret ballot election among his fellow Democrats, may take the top seat in the House.