So if I question the choice of Alcee Hastings as Chairman of the House intelligence committee

[trumad]

will I be accused of swift boating him and sneaking in from Free Republic?

<snip>

"My goodness gracious, when does it end? When does it end?" Hastings asked me yesterday in a long telephone interview. "It's no way that I can prove a negative. I can't go back and try to establish for everybody alive my bona fides. I've earned my stripes and I suffered through 9 3/4 years that would have crushed the average person, and fortunately for me I was not the kind of person that was crushed."

It's impossible not to like Hastings. But as someone who covered his impeachment and Senate trial, I can't get past the facts of the case, which convince me that Hastings did indeed agree to conspire with a close friend, a prominent Washington lawyer named William A. Borders Jr., to solicit the bribe. Borders was convicted of the bribery scheme in a separate trial, and he served additional time for contempt rather than testify in the congressional proceedings.

The evidence against Hastings is circumstantial, but it's too much to explain away: a suspicious pattern of telephone calls between Hastings and Borders at key moments in the case; Borders's apparent insider knowledge of developments in the criminal case; Hastings's appearance at a Miami hotel, as promised by Borders as a signal that the judge had agreed to the payoff; a cryptic telephone conversation between the two men that appears to be a coded discussion of the bribe arrangement.

Consider: Hastings, a federal judge, gets word from Borders's lawyer that Borders has been arrested for conspiring to bribe him and that the FBI wants to interview him. Instead of calling the FBI agents whose names and numbers he's been given, Hastings leaves his hotel without checking out and heads to the airport outside Baltimore instead of National, where there's an earlier flight. At BWI, Hastings calls his girlfriend, has her call him back at a different pay phone, then asks her to leave the house to call him from a pay phone, then calls her back from a different pay phone. He doesn't speak to the FBI until they track him down at the girlfriend's house later that night.

Speaker-in-waiting Pelosi: This is not the behavior of an innocent man -- or of an intelligence committee chairman.

[Erika]

1. We should follow Pelosi's lead

Not blindly, but with faith she'll see the party through.

[GymGeekAus]

2. We have a right to be an informed electorate.

We should question.

And even demand some transparency back.