Senator Feinstein Quits Committee Over Controversy

Senator Diane Feinstein stepped down as chair from the Senate Subcommittee on Military Construction Appropriations last week because of a long-standing conflict of interest with her husband's companies. According to news stories, Senator Feinstein would normally not have known what companies were bidding on what contracts. However, a legal advisor to the Senator and a business partner of her husband's, Michael R. Klein, was apparently sending the Senator lists of projects her husband's companies were bidding on. Klein stated that this was to avoid the Senator finding herself with an ethics problem.

Seems it caused one.

According to MetroNewspapers, Wendell Rawls, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C. commented, "I cannot understand how someone who complains so vigorously as she has about conflicts of interest in the government and Congress can have turned such a deaf ear and a blind eye to her own. Because of her level of influence, the conflict of interest is just as serious as the Halliburton-Cheney connection."

Hundreds of millions of dollars in defense contracts were awarded to her husband's companies and Mrs. Feinstein now finds herself neck-deep in an ethics controversy. And the left is just as mad, if not more so, than the right.