Sunday, August 3, 2014

PEU Bayh to Cover for CIA


Ex-Senator Evan Bayh will head an inquiry into CIA disciplinary action or reforms needed as a result of the CIA spying on members of Congress.  Note that Bayh is already a member of the CIA advisory board.  Insiders, the kind that don't criticize one another, get these kind of appointments.

Compliant elected leaders make hay in retirement.  Evan Bayh is a Senior Advisor to Apollo Global Management, a private equity underwriter (PEU).

As partner with law/lobbying firm McGuire Woods, Bayh provides strategic advice to the firms largest clients, one of which is Apollo Group, the monster for-profit educator part owned by Apollo Global Management.  

Bayh sits on five corporate boards, Berry Plastics, Fifth Third Bank, McGraw-Hill Education, Marathon Petroleum, and RLJ Lodging Trust.  RLJ is Blue team backer Robert L. Johnson, founder of BET and Carlyle Group joint venture partner.

Bayh served on the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence from 2001 to 2010.  When he was appointed to the CIA Advisory Board is unclear.  A search of the CIA's website produced no hits on "Evan Bayh."


President Obama's Intelligence boards don't show Evan's name.


Heck, even a search of Bayh's name on Apollo Global's website produced no results (see picture at top of this piece).

NYT wrote about the period of time in which these offenses occurred.

Committee Democrats have spent more than five years working on a report about the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program during the Bush administration, which employed brutal interrogation methods like waterboarding. 

It's highly likely Bayh was a sitting Senator when the CIA rooted through Congressional computers set up specifically for this investigation.  Evan Bayh has a standing conflict of interest as a directly involved party in the case.  But who better to hide the truth, ask people to move along, say nothing to see here. I expect the most Bayh and company to do is to delegate blame to underlings.

The wording in news reports is revealing.  Even before the report has been released the public gets words of minimization and obfuscation:

According to an unclassified summary of the inspector general's report obtained by Reuters, he found that five agency employees, two lawyers and three information technology staffers, "improperly accessed" a data network Senate investigators were using to pursue their inquiry

Here's the frame for no one being charged in potentially the biggest case since Watergate.

However, the inspector general's summary said it turned out that the "factual basis" for the criminal referral the agency sent to the Justice Department "was not supported" because the lawyer making the referral "had been provided inaccurate information."  
This is the kind of horse hockey that causes citizens to view our leaders as fools. We're the fools if we buy their fictions and cover-up.  Ex-Senator Evan Bayh will give us a story and it will be one listened to on the inside. At least Larry Summers will find it a scintillating tale.

Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream.  Summers and Bayh had a choice.  Their dreams were to raise themselves up by protecting their ilk.  The rest be damned.