"Harry Reid Tied to Chinagate Figure"

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid accepted donations from key Clinton Chinagate fundraiser John Huang - and later pushed for Senate confirmation of the judge who let Huang off with a slap on the wrist.

News of Reid's Chinagate donations resurfaced this week in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which detailed the top Democrat's relationship with a Nevada church whose pastor has been indicted for misusing federal grants obtained by the powerful Senate Democrat.

A federal grant of $423,000 was arranged by Reid for the Alliance Collegiums Association of Nevada, which was run by the Rev. Willie Davis, the longtime pastor of Second Baptist Church...

[...much damning info deleted...]

But Sen. Reid went to bat for Huang's judge, after being asked to reach out to other Mormon Senators by Mrs. Paez, a fellow Mormon.

"That's what I did," Reid told the New York Times.

The argument appears to have worked with Sen. Orrin Hatch, who told Utah's Deseret News, "I cannot accept, in the absence of any supporting evidence, that two branches of the government engaged in a conspiracy" to give Huang a light sentence...

Politics · Mon, 10/03/2005 - 03:16 · · Importance: 1