© Jack Cashill
AmericanThinker.com - May 23, 2010

hat Congresman was 10-term Republican Curt Weldon. Weldon had committed one unforgivable crime: investigating the intelligence failures of the Clinton era. Payback began in 2004 after The Los Angeles Times ran a series on members of congress whose family members lobby or work as consultants. The Weldon family member in the spotlight was his daughter, Karen Weldon. In 2002, the then 28 year-old had co-founded Solutions North America, a business consultancy.

That much said, as the Times also acknowledged, “Congressional ethics rules provide few barriers to the practice. They do not forbid members of Congress from helping companies or others who are paying their relatives.” The House Ethics Committee, in fact, cleared Weldon of any wrongdoing.

That was not clearance enough for the mischief-makers from the George Soros-funded watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). Melanie Sloan, a former assistant United States attorney and now the executive director of CREW, petitioned the Justice Department to investigate Weldon and determine whether the congressman had violated a federal bribery law. This petition, once executed and amplified, would spell the end of Weldon’s career.

Sloan had been recruited just the year before by a pair of wealthy Democratic activists, Norman Eisen and Louis Mayberg. Sloan, then an assistant United States attorney in Washington D.C., saw the potential in their brainchild, signed on, and nurtured CREW to life.

In principle, CREW was to function as a nonpartisan operation. Its presumed target--"government officials who sacrifice the common good to special interests." In reality, however, CREW has emerged as something of a dirty tricks operation for a truly worrisome cabal known as the Democratic Alliance. The Alliance even worried the Washington Post. The subhead of a July 2006 article on the Alliance read, “Some in Party Bristle at Secrecy and Liberal Tilt.”

To join the Democratic Alliance, a prospective "partner" had to put up a $25,000 entry fee and annual dues of $30,000. In addition, partners had to invest at least $200,000 each year in organizations, like CREW, that the Alliance endorsed. The Post quoted Alliance partner and former Loral Space & Communications CEO, Bernard Schwartz, as saying that the group offers partners "an array of opportunities that have passed their smell test."

If Schwartz’s history is at all typical, the Alliance partners could use an operation like CREW to watch their respective backs. In February 1996, after the failure in China of the Long March 3B rocket, Schwartz dispatched a Loral-led review team to review the crash and suggest refinements.

The Cox Committee in the House would later describe Schwartz’s actions as “an unlicensed defense service for the PRC [People’s Republic of China] that resulted in the improvement of the reliability of the PRC’s military rockets and ballistic missiles.”

So serious was the offense that in 1998 the Justice Department launched an investigation. Incredibly, while the investigation was in process, Sandy Berger, then the national security adviser, initiated a retroactive waiver for Schwartz that would make prosecution impossible. In that Schwartz had given $630,000 to the DNC in the 1996 election cycle, the most of any donor, President Clinton approved the waiver, and the case against Schwartz died on the spot.

In December 1997, despite his act of borderline treason, Schwartz celebrated his 71st birthday at the White House with the Clintons. The media chose not to get excited about any of this. Weldon did. In fact, he traces his targeting by the Clintons and their allies to his investigations of the White House’s self-destructive technology transfers with the People’s Republic. This alone may explain Berger’s active role in his undoing.

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