"I will keep my mouth shut for sure"

I have a legal pad on which I jot down ideas for blog posts as they occur to me. I get around to writing up most of them, for better or worse. But sometimes I fall so far behind that topics lapse.

One that almost got away lately was the news that the Oregon Justice Department has decided not to pursue criminal charges against anyone for the falsely reported mid-six-figure campaign contribution by one of Crypto Boy Sam Bankman's "constellation" of cronies and entities to the Democratic Party of Oregon in October 2022. Although he denies it, Senator Ron Wyden's fingerprints were all over that one, and as soon as light was shone on it, the moolah was promptly returned to the bankruptcy estate from which the fools who invested with Crypto Boy could hope to get some of their money back.

The feds long ago dropped actual charges relating to those and similar contributions – a seeming dereliction of duty that I complained about here and here. And now the state has also decided that golly, there just isn't enough evidence to prosecute anybody on state charges for falsifying the report of the contribution, either. It's typical Salem, where there's no criminal penalty for cheating on anything. You just have to stop your fraud once you get caught, and you might have to switch jobs without getting the customarily juicy severance payout.

My procrastination on the Cryptogate story was broken today by this post by that troublemaker lawyer guy, Jeff Eager, over in Bend. He shows that the money people in the Oregon Democratic machine – all of whom answer to Wyden, formally or informally – knew all along that there was a good chance that the miracle half-million they were getting was being mis-attributed. But they went ahead and filed the false disclosure, willfully blind (at best) to the real source of the contribution. Eager excerpts some e-mail messages including one in which a party researcher assures her boss, "I will keep my mouth shut for sure."

It's too bad that Eager pushes the partisan angle of this so hard. He overplays it, really. If he would tone down his "Democrats are evil" pitch, maybe someone with a major readership would latch on. I would never vote for a Republican for anything, ever, but this story is important to me. It's about the corruption, not which color t-shirt the crooks were wearing.

As eager as Eager is to take Wyden down a few pegs over this incident, he's also up against enormous inertia. I doubt that anyone in the mainstream media will pick up on the information he's uncovered. It's much easier to just regurgitate the senator's press releases and send somebody out to take his picture when he's in Oregon grandstanding about some thing or other that he won't actually get anything accomplished about. "Ron Wyden kisses a cow in Baker County." "Ron Wyden tells Roseburg town hall meeting that he doesn't like the Kroger-Safeway merger." "Ron Wyden in Benton County to say he'll fight for Social Security." Always wearing some dopey baseball hat with "Oregon" on it somewhere to remind you that he doesn't live where his wife and three teenage kids have lived their entire lives, which is New York City. 

Saint Ron has been in Congress for 43 of his 75 years, but even if it were 143, it could never be enough for the lazy local media.

But anyway, sleep easy, folks, that campaign contribution unpleasantness is now officially over, except for a lonely old Federal Elections Commission complaint that Eager still has pending. I'm sure that will get resolved late on a Friday afternoon, or maybe the day before Thanksgiving. And one guy who won't be held accountable is you-know-who.