Closing The Books On Mikey Suits? Not A Chance

The theme in our recent coverage of the Mikey Suits Grimm case has been that Grimm's case leaves more unanswered questions than it answers, questions almost entirely ignored by the FBI, by Congress and by the media. Grimm's ties to the Mafia -- and the work he's done for organized crime-- are almost never mentioned anywhere. The FBI very much prefers it that way. So does John Boehner. The Grimm denouement is not meant to get to the bottom of anything, just to sweep a potentially embarrassing chapter in the culture of corruption that is the United States Congress under the carpet.

Evan Ratliff, writing for The New Yorker on January 1, termed Grimm's appalling career as "equal parts bluster and farce." He is one of the few pundits following Grimm who seems to be aware that Grimm's crimes go beyond threatening to break a reporter in half like a boy and cheating on his taxes. Most coverage barely hints that those pieces are just the most superficial and easiest-to-grasp parts of Grimm's life of crime. "These are not trivialities," wrote Ratliff, "but the public will likely never obtain answers to more serious questions around Grimm’s conduct as an elected representative. In 2012, the Times reported extensively on hundreds of thousands of dollars Grimm raised from the followers of the New York City rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto, detailing allegations that Grimm advised contributors on how to exceed legal limits and that he collected donations in envelopes full of cash. (Pinto, in an absurdly complicated investigation spanning New York and Israel, later reportedly accused Grimm of blackmailing him.) By 2014, a federal investigation was underway, and one of Grimm’s campaign contributors (and former girlfriend), Diana Durand, was soon under indictment for using straw donors to exceed contribution limits. The U.S. Attorney’s office had assigned Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Kaminsky, known for his success in public-corruption prosecutions, to Grimm’s investigation. But Kaminsky left the case in May to run for state assembly, Durand pleaded guilty without implicating Grimm, and no campaign-finance charges were ever brought against the congressman."

Federal prosecutors were left with the Healthalicious tax fraud, which, depending on one’s political affiliation, came off as either Capone-like in its catch-them-for-what-you-can-prove approach or evidence of the “political witch hunt” Grimm had invoked against the allegations all along.

Grimm has long made a habit of leaving such problematic connections in his wake, and then chalking up any accusations of impropriety to conspiracy. I first became interested in him while investigating one of his F.B.I. informants, a scam artist named Josef von Habsburg who helped lure a lawyer into a dubious sting operation. “I am an F.B.I. agent, I took an oath,” the then aspiring congressman railed at me when I asked him questions about his F.B.I. past, including the night-club incident. “You’re trying to do a chop job on me.” When I asked him why he left the F.B.I. when he did, just after having helped build a large and successful case against fraud on Wall Street, he said, “I was really at the top of my career. If I was gonna leave, leave at the top.” Later, the Times reported on Grimm’s post-F.B.I. business ties to a convicted fraudster and former F.B.I. agent in Texas, along with the campaign-finance questions and the allegations that Grimm’s partner in Healthalicious had connections to the Gambino crime family. “This attack is politically motivated,” Grimm responded.

Federal prosecutors have not made clear whether any of their investigations remain open. One former Assistant U.S. Attorney with whom I spoke-- who did not have direct knowledge of the case-- found it unlikely that Grimm would have taken any plea deal that didn’t include at least tacit agreement from prosecutors to no longer pursue such charges.

And an implied indictment of the sheer incompetence and grotesque corruption of Steve Israel and the DCCC he has thoroughly wrecked and turned into an ineffective bulwark against the Democrats themselves:

While some Democrats accused him of shamefully holding his guilty plea until after Election Day, he may have done his constituents a favor by saving them from an opponent so inept that he earned more mockery than even the congressman himself. (“In Domenic Recchia, the Democrats have fielded a candidate so dumb, ill-informed, evasive and inarticulate that voting for a thuggish Republican who could wind up in a prison jumpsuit starts to make rational sense,” the Daily News observed in one of the most comically underwhelming endorsements ever published.) Now each party will have a new chance to field a less-bad-than-the-other-guy candidate in a special election.

Today Israel and Schumer are working with the new DCCC figurehead, Ben Ray Luján, to recruit another loser candidate, this time anti-Choice conservative, Assemblyman Michael Cusick. Until the Democratic Party tosses garbage like Steve Israel aside and starts to stand for something that Democratic voters stand for, the Republicans will be sitting pretty. With Israel, Pelosi picked a Blue Dog to head her DCCC-- and now she has a timid puppet trying to replicate his vision-- so she's getting exactly what she asked for. Time for this failed, sclerotic regime to move along-- and fast.

Suits and Israel-- you can't have one without the other

UPDATE: GOP Rush To Donovan Slowing Down?

This morning the right-wing National Review warned Republicans that running Donovan-- pretty much an appeal to inmate racism of the Staten Island GOP base-- might not be that good an idea. David Marcus offers 5 reasons:

1. Hype in this election is bad for the GOP.

This should be a sleepy special election, a low-turnout afterthought to the contentious 2014 midterms. Under those conditions, the basic math of the district should provide a comfortable Republican victory. But Donovan changes all of that. He makes this a minor national story, but far worse, he makes it a huge story in New York City. Democratic activists will be motivated to try to defeat him. The bigger this election gets, the better chance a moderate Democrat has of taking the seat. It becomes the “I can’t breathe” election.

2. Running Donovan is bad for the New York City GOP.

It’s no secret that New York City is a pretty liberal place. But notwithstanding its progressive leanings, Gotham hadn’t elected a Democrat mayor in over two decades prior to Bill de Blasio’s 2013 victory. Part of the reason de Blasio won, despite being a very flawed candidate, is that Republicans had no serious challenger. The primary between eventual winner Joe Lhota and outsider John Catsimatidis was a cringeworthy race to general-election sacrifice. The Republican brand will not be resurrected by making the prosecutor from the infamous Garner case the top GOP elected official in the city.

3. Running Donovan is bad for the national GOP.

When Grimm agreed to step down after meeting with John Boehner, it was widely viewed as a victory for the speaker, who was ridding his caucus of controversy. Well, welcome back controversy once Donovan steps through the doors of Congress. Whether reasonable or not, the narrative will be that Republicans elected the man who gave the police a pass to kill black men. It’s difficult to imagine how this will help grow the Republican tent.

4. There are legitimate questions about the Garner grand jury.

A featured talking point from conservatives during the recent unrest has been that Ferguson and Staten Island were very different cases. The Ferguson grand jury had a complicated situation to parse out, with varied testimony and evidence. The Garner grand jury, on the other hand, faced a case in which a man had died because of, to quote the coroner’s report, “compression of neck (choke hold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police”-- and there was video to prove Garner posed no real threat to the officers. To date, Donovan has not provided a compelling explanation as to why or how the grand jury failed to indict. Until he does, many people, including some Republicans, will feel trepidation about voting for him.

5. There may be a better choice.

The only other serious Republican contender for the NY11 seat is Nicole Malliotakis, a young, popular state assemblywoman whose district, like the 11th, spans the Verrazano bridge between Staten Island and Brooklyn. In 2013, Malliotakis spoke at CPAC as one of the ten rising GOP stars under 40. Unlike the polarizing Donovan, Malliotakis has the promise of appealing to potential new Republican voters in New York City. As the city’s leading Republican, she would offer a fresh vision and image of what the new Grand Old Party can and should look like.