Ex lawmaker Ted Klaudt says state misused federal funds

[existentialist]

http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/news/article_ac73474a-a...


Ex lawmaker Ted Klaudt says state misused federal funds

A former South Dakota lawmaker has threatened in court documents to give evidence that the state misused $750,000 in federal funds to a television station if a judge doesn't help resolve his legal troubles.


. . . .

He asked U.S. Appeals Court Judge Roger Wollman for help with his legal troubles and said if the judge refused, he would forward his evidence to FOX News, "as they have expressed an interest in my case."

"I am not going to beat around the bush," Klaudt said in the court documents. "I am trying to save my own neck, and if I need to, I am prepared to goes far as I am forced to go to achieve that goal."

Klaudt was convicted in 2007 in Pierre on four counts of second-degree rape. He was accused of touching the breasts and genitals of two foster daughters in phony examinations on the premise he would help them sell their reproductive eggs. The girls lived in the Klaudts' home as part of a program that provides foster care for young people who have no safe home to return to after completing time in juvenile reform programs.



The following points, either implicit in the story or unstated and better known within the state are worth noting:

1) He is threatening to reveal information which, if true, he should have revealed long ago.

2) He is improperly appealing to a federal judge to do something that the judge has no authority to do.

3) He is threatening to go to FOX News "as they have expressed an interest in my case."

4) The information he is threatening to reveal has to be damaging to Republicans (if he really has such information)because otherwise he would have revealed it long ago and because the state government he accuses of the wrong doing was dominated by Republicans throughout his time in the legislature.

5) He openly acknowledges that he is trying to save his own neck.

6) He became, while in office, one of the leaders of the Republican dominated state legislature. Among other posts he was chairman of the House committee that oversaw the department of social services.

7) The Department of Social Services he received reports of Klaudt's abuse of the underage girls, at least some of whom had been placed with Klaudt in his capacity as a foster parent by the Department of Social Services, but they did not reveal their information until after Kluadt had lost an election in which he had tried to move up from the SD State House to the SD State Senate.

8) This has to be some type of indication of the quality of leadership under what is close to being a one party system.

9) It is also some type of indication of the type of supervision given to state programs by the Republican dominated state legislature.