Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

And we're back!

Blogger kinda had some sort of issue with a time machine and a sperm bank, and basically screwed over everything I posted on Thursday and half of Wednesday too.  I got that straightened out and the posts should be all back.

We appear to be back to our regular scheduled craziness.  So what happened over the last 48 hours or so that Blogger tried to erase from the time stream?

The Senate Ethics committee released its report on now former GOP Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, who officially resigned his seat last week hoping the whole Osama thing would give him news cycle cover.  Which it did, and it worked too.  Right up until Senate Dems waited until yesterday to release the report, that is.  And not only is Ensign a complete scumbag, but now that he's not in Congress, he's facing the Justice Department and his chief of staff, John Lopez, just cut an immunity deal.

The special counsel working with the Senate Ethics Committee applied for immunity for both Lopez and Doug Hampton, the former Ensign staffer with whose wife Ensign had the affair that ended his Senate career. The Justice Department didn't agree initially to either request but eventually dropped its opposition to granting immunity to Lopez. Federal prosecutors ultimately indicted Hampton for violating conflict of interest laws.
The report concludes that Lopez's contacts with Doug Hampton after he left the Senator's office and began lobbying on behalf of clients were improper. From the report (which mentions Lopez's name 232 times):

Senator Ensign agreed with Mr. Hampton and Mr. Lopez, to have Mr. Lopez be the point person for Mr. Hampton's contacts with the Senator's office in order to provide Mr. Hampton with the necessary assistance for his lobbying efforts during his post-employment period, and not for the purpose of making certain that Mr. Hampton complied with lobbying restrictions.

The Senate Ethics Committee also discovered contemporaneous emails which showed Ensign "agreed to and encouraged the improper contacts between Mr. Hampton and Mr. Lopez." Lopez told investigators that Ensign wanted him to assist Hampton because the Senator "wanted it out of sight, out of mind," so that Lopez could take heat on the Senator's behalf.

For those of you a little rusty on d'affair l'Ensign, it goes something like this:  Ensign was basically shtupping Cynthia Hampton, a long-time family friend he had known for decades, when the Ensigns invited the Hamptons to movie in with them after the Hamptons were robbed in 2007.  Hampton's husband Doug found out about the affair and then kept his job with the Senator's office.

The real problem was that Ensign got sloppy and kept the affair up.  He got caught by people other than the Hamptions.  Doug Hampton drew the attention of the Feds.  It gets worse from there:  Doug Hampton is now facing seven counts of violating federal lobbyist conflict-of-interest laws, and as I mentioned before, Ensign's chief of staff, John Lopez, has just cut an immunity deal to spill the beans on Ensign and Hampton.

Ensign's parents gave the Hamptons a "gift" of $96,000 to make all this go away, on top of everything else.  That absolutely red flagged the Feds as the gift was posed as severance for Doug Hampton leaving his "job" as a senior Ensign aide.

Oh, but it gets even worse.  Turns out more than a few other people on Capitol Hill knew what kind of games Ensign was playing, most notably Oklahoma GOP Sen. Tom Coburn.

And now this whole mess is really, really going to get good.