The disgraced three-term Republican was found guilty of 17 felony offenses including conspiracy, honest services wire fraud, extortion under color of official right, racketeering, money laundering and making false statements to insurance regulators. Renzi is scheduled to be sentenced in August and faces decades in prison, according to a Department of Justice (DOJ) news release that lays out the convicted lawmaker’s storied career.  

Renzi has for years been under fire for his unscrupulous acts and in 2008 was indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiracy, extortion, money laundering and wire fraud. Authorities accused Renzi of using his influence on a House Natural Resources Committee to orchestrate a land swap with the federal government that financially benefited him and his associates to the tune of millions of dollars. The lawmaker was also charged with embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from clients of his family insurance business to fund his congressional campaign.

The now infamous land deal took place in 2005. Renzi vigorously promoted a property sale near the Fort Huachuca Army post in southeastern Arizona as a swap in which potential buyers could exchange it for more valuable, federally-owned land. Instead, Renzi’s friend sold the 480 acres for a multi-million dollar profit and Renzi never introduced legislation to complete the swap for the new owners.

During his years in the U.S. House of Representatives Renzi consistently introduced and voted for bills that benefited his father’s Virginia-based defense company, Mantech International, and in 2003 he sponsored legislation—that got signed into law—that dealt Mantech hundreds of millions of dollars. At the time Renzi’s father, a retired Army General, was the executive vice president of Mantech, which provided information technology services to a number of intelligence and defense-related government agencies. Coincidentally, executives of Mantech International were Renzi’s largest campaign contributors.

The multiple convictions of this shady politician end what federal prosecutors call a “streak of criminal activity” that betrayed the public trust and abused the political process. “After years of misconduct as a businessman, political candidate and member of Congress, Mr. Renzi now faces the consequences for breaking the laws that he took an oath to support and defend,” said the Assistant Attorney General handling the case for the DOJ.

That certainly doesn’t keep with President Obama’s guarantee of “unprecedented level of openness in government.” Those were his words, quoted by media outlets around the globe, right after taking office. It hasn’t quite materialized. In fact, in many ways the Obama administration has been among the more secretive in history or at least in recent times.

Just a few weeks ago Obama’s pals in the mainstream media blasted him for failing to deliver on his “campaign promise to make his administration the most transparent in history.” One newspaper even quoted a former FBI special agent who’s working to rescind a transparency award given to the president in 2011 by a handful of open-government groups. The administration treats the public like spies and journalists like conspiracists, according to the federal agent.

This week’s story will undoubtedly fuel that fire. It comes from the same major news organization that the Obama Justice Department targeted, secretly obtaining phone records of reporters and editors in an apparent effort to pin down the source of a leak. In the course of a lengthy probe, the media outlet uncovered that top Obama political appointees, including at least one cabinet secretary, are using secret government email accounts.

The public will never know the extent of the scheme because most government agencies have refused to provide email addresses for political appointees sought by the news outlet months ago under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). This should be public record, but clearly the administration is hiding something. Adding insult to injury, one federal agency, the Department of Labor (DOL) tried collecting north of $1 million for its list of email addresses! The agency claimed it had to pay 50 people to work three weeks retrieving the records, which include thousands of computer backup tapes.

At least the DOL acknowledged having the files. This excerpt from the story diplomatically explains that it’s illegal for government agencies to have a covert method of communicating. “The secret email accounts complicate an agency’s legal responsibilities to find and turn over emails in response to congressional or internal investigations, civil lawsuits or public records requests because employees assigned to compile such responses would necessarily need to know about the accounts to search them. Secret accounts also drive perceptions that government officials are trying to hide actions or decisions.”

Judicial Watch encounters these sorts of obstacles regularly in its never-ending work exposing government corruption, which goes hand in hand with secrecy and often forces litigation. The Obama administration has kept JW quite busy and in court often. How bad is the problem? A few years ago JW President Tom Fitton told Congress how, under Obama, government agencies have actually created additional hurdles and stonewalled even the most basic FOIA requests. “The Bush administration was tough and tricky, but the Obama administration is tougher and trickier,” Fitton told lawmakers. Fitton testified before the House and Senate during “Sunshine Week,” a national initiative by the news media, nonprofits and other organizations to promote government transparency.

This includes being the highlight of “karaoke nights” during burdensome congressional sessions, “when things got tough or extremely difficult on the House floor.” The corrupt congressman, Jesse Jackson Jr., pleaded guilty to fraud earlier this year for illegally using $750,000 in campaign money to finance his lavish lifestyle. He hasn’t been sentenced and his buddies in Congress are trying to help him out by appealing to the federal judge that will determine how much time he serves.

This particular request for leniency in Jackson’s sentencing comes from Congresswoman Marcia Fudge, a Cleveland Democrat who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus. In a letter to U.S. District Court Judge Robert Wilkins Fudge describes Jackson Jr. as “highly intelligent” and reminisces about the disgraced lawmaker’s karaoke skills and one-man skits. “He made us realize that we could still have fun while addressing important national issues,” Fudge writes.  

The congresswoman also tells the judge that Jackson Jr. is a “tireless advocate for the poor and underserved” who is known for his efforts to redevelop decaying neighborhoods. In short, Fudge claims Jackson Jr. is a “loyal public servant with so much more to give” and she humbly tells the judge that “Jesse is worth saving and I know he can continue to have a positive impact on the lives of others as he has with my colleagues and me.”

Here is a more accurate version of this not so loyal public servant, whose many transgressions landed him on Judicial Watch’s list of Washington’s Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians. Before getting busted for illegally financing his extravagant lifestyle with campaign money, Jackson Jr. was embroiled in a massive political scandal for attempting to bribe his way into the U.S. Senate.

The brazen scheme was exposed during the corruption trial and retrial of convicted Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who is serving a 14-year sentence in Colorado. JW covered both trials live in a Chicago federal court where major political drama that reached all the way up to the White House unfolded daily.

According to court testimony, Jackson Jr., who represented the Chicago area in the U.S. House for nearly two decades, and his top fundraiser offered to buy the Illinois seat that opened up in the U.S. Senate when Barack Obama got elected president. The son of the world-renowned “civil rights” con man met with the disgraced ex governor’s representative in late 2008 and offered to pay $1 million in exchange for the appointment, which was to be made by the governor.

The raw document, from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), is from 1998 and Judicial Watch conducted a thorough analysis after obtaining it years later as part of an ongoing Terrorism Research and Analysis Project. It was distressing enough when JW pieced it together and published its analysis in 2005 and it’s incredibly disturbing now that “radicalized” Chechen brothers detonated bombs at the Boston Marathon.

Last week JW was the first to report that the older terrorist, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, could have been deported years ago after a criminal arrest and that his brother, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was granted American citizenship on the anniversary of 9/11. In that report JW also revealed that it had uncovered critical intelligence documents detailing al Qaeda’s activities in Chechnya, including the creation of a 1995 camp—ordered by Osama bin Laden—to train “international terrorists” to carry out plots against Americans and westerners.

Previous to that, JW conducted the analysis of the 1998 intelligence report for a project called Working Group on Children as Intended Targets of Terrorism at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. The intelligence report focuses largely on al Qaeda’s expansion into Chechnya and the Caucuses and reveals that bin Laden deployed an Islamist leader named Amir Khattab to Chechnya in order to organize terror training bases and expand the influence of the al Qaeda network.

The ultimate goal is to put “sleeper cells” in place, the intelligence document shows. That means operatives go about their ordinary, inconspicuous lives among the targeted population until they are activated for a specific act or in support of a particular mission. It certainly appears that the Boston Marathon bombers operated this way. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been referred to as a regular college student by those who knew him and Tamerlan Tsarnaev was an award-winning boxer with aspirations of making the U.S. Olympic team.

Chechen terrorists, namely Shamil Basayev and the Islamic nationalist gang led by terror chieftain Mosvar Baryayev, have led the way with adaptations and experiments that have been employed in terror strikes around the world, according to JW’s findings. Besides cell phone detonation of backpack bombs, among their favored tactics are hospital bombings and hostage taking, suicide bombers and multiple rail attacks.

The confirmed existence of a secure, reliable, terrorist-sponsored direct route to Chechnya from Pakistan and Afghanistan through Turkey and Azerbaijan is the most stunning information point within the 1998 intelligence report, JW found, because it dates back to the 1990s. It’s also incredibly noteworthy that al Qaeda is developing bases in Chechnya and the North Caucuses because those areas are “unreachable by strikes from the West” and therefore a “safe haven” for radical, militant Islamists to recruit, plan, train and operate.   

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announces its participation as a major sponsor of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), February 9-11, 2012, at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, 2660 Woodley Road, NW, Washington, DC. Judicial Watch is sponsoring the conference’s main event, the Ronald Reagan Banquet, which will feature a presentation by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and a speech by Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.  Other major Judicial Watch activities include a major press conference on a new election integrity campaign, a panel on the constitutional issues of Obamacare and an educational seminar on the use of the Freedom of Information Act.

The following are details of Judicial Watch’s CPAC 2012 activities:

·     Thursday, February 9, 9:30 a.m., Virginia Ballroom:  Press conference event announcing an important effort to help protect the integrity of the 2012 elections.

·     Friday, February 10, 1:25 pm, Marriott Ballroom:  Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton will moderate a panel discussion, “Obamacare: Why It’s Unconstitutional and What Conservatives Need to Do.”  (The event immediately follows a scheduled presentation by Gov. Mitt Romney.)

·     Friday, 7:30 pm, Marriott Ballroom:  Judicial Watch will sponsor the premiere event at CPAC:  the Ronald Reagan Banquet.  Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is the scheduled keynoter for that special evening.  Judicial Watch and Victory Film Group will also release the teaser trailer for the upcoming documentary film directed by Stephen K. Bannon.

·     Saturday, 1:30 p.m., Taft meeting room:  Judicial Watch will teach a seminar on how conservatives can put the Freedom of Information Act to work to uncover government secrets.

“Americans are fed up with the unprecedented expansion of government power and secrecy we have seen over the last three years. With our participation in CPAC, Judicial Watch is proud to stand with thousands of other conservatives seeking to combat Washington corruption. We must fight for ethics, accountability and transparency in the White House and in Congress — that is our message for CPAC.  Judicial Watch is the largest and most active government watchdog in the nation.  Through our major sponsorship of CPAC, we look forward to educating more members of the grassroots about the bipartisan corruption enveloping our nation’s capital,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

About CPAC: Taking place in Washington, DC, each year, CPAC brings together nearly 10,000 attendees and all of the leading conservative organizations and speakers impacting conservative thought in the nation. Regularly seen on C-SPAN and other national news networks, CPAC has been the premiere event for any major elected official or public personality seeking to discuss issues of the day with conservatives. From presidents of the United States to college student leaders, CPAC has become the place to find our nation’s current and future leaders.

About Judicial Watch, Inc.: Judicial Watch is a conservative, nonpartisan educational foundation that promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government, politics and the law. Through its educational endeavors, Judicial Watch advocates high standards of ethics and morality in our nation’s public life and seeks to ensure that political and judicial officials do not abuse the powers entrusted to them by the American people. The motto of Judicial Watch is “Because no one is above the law!” To this end, Judicial Watch uses the open records or freedom of information laws and other tools to investigate and uncover misconduct by government officials and litigation to hold to account politicians and public officials who engage in corrupt activities.  Judicial Watch does not endorse or oppose candidates for public office.