Michael Steele Hasn't Been Indicted For Ripping Off Campaign Donors (Yet) But He's Already Raising Eyebrows At The RNC

It's common knowledge around Washington that in 2006, when Michael Steele was a Maryland Senate candidate destined to fail miserably, the clueless hip-hop pretender was ripping off his own campaign treasury on behalf of family members and involved in financing a GOP limo-and-hooker service. Recently the RNC removed his ability to spend money on their behalf and put watchdogs in place to monitor any expenditures he tries to make and report back to a committee if he appears to be stealing again. Today he threatened to resign if they castrate him any further.

While Steele was out ineffectively trying to make partisan hay by defending the virginity of the CIA, the far right Moonie Times was revealing that he's up to his old tricks again. Perhaps he's making such an ass out of himself on the public stage so he can distract attention from his efforts to rip off the RNC financially.

When Michael S. Steele took over as chairman of the Republican National Committee earlier this year, he brought along longtime personal assistant Belinda Cook and gave her a salary nearly three times what her predecessor made.

Mrs. Cook's son, Lee, also landed an RNC job.

Mr. Steele hired another family friend, Angela Sailor, to be the party's outreach director at a salary of $180,000, more than double her predecessor's compensation, though new responsibilities have been added to the job, according to a high-ranking RNC official and Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings.

Mr. Steele's early record and personnel decisions figure to be hot topics at a special meeting of Republican state party chairmen Tuesday and Wednesday at National Harbor in Washington's Maryland suburbs. His hiring of friends and the salaries he is paying them already helped to instigate a struggle over who controls the party's purse strings, one that forced the new party chairman to relinquish some control to elected RNC members.

"These salaries we hear about are way out of line for what staff should be paid for working for a political party, which most of us think of as a cause," said Hawaii Republican Party Chairman Willis Lee. "And if certain staff at the national committee are making that much, then the public understandably might think they are examples of cronyism."

..."These types of salaries my friend Michael Steele is paying show why it is important for the protection of all of us to have a signed set of rules of good governance, and I am pleased that all the parties have agreed to have checks and balances in place to avoid any perception of impropriety," Mr. Lee [an RNC member from Hawaii] said.

The "parties" he refers to are Mr. Steele and his top advisers on the one hand, and, on the other, Randy Pullen, the elected RNC treasurer; Blake Hall, the RNC general counsel; and three former RNC officers who co-sponsored the "good governance" resolution, which Mr. Steele said is a move to strip him of his rightful powers.