Buying Immunity...

This is truly mind bending. At a time when Senator Jay Rockefeller was said to be steering the secretive Senate Intelligence Committee to give retroactive immunity to telecoms that helped the government secretly spy on Americans, he was suddenly inundated with political contributions from the very companies that he was seeking to gain retroactive immunity for.

Top Verizon executives, including CEO Ivan Seidenberg and President Dennis Strigl, wrote personal checks to Rockefeller totalling $23,500 in March, 2007. Prior to that apparently coordinated flurry of 29 donations, only one of those executives had ever donated to Rockefeller (at least while working for Verizon).

In fact, prior to 2007, contributions to Rockefeller from company executives at AT&T and Verizon were mostly non-existent.

But that changed around the same time that the companies began lobbying Congress to grant them retroactive immunity from lawsuits seeking billions for their alleged participation in secret, warrantless surveillance programs that targeted Americans.

The Spring '07 checks represent 86 percent of money donated to Rockefeller by Verizon employees since at least 2001.

AT&T executives discovered a fondness for Rockefeller just a month after Verizon execs did and over a three-month span, collectively made donations totalling $19,350.

AT&T Vice President Fred McCallum began the giving spree in May with a $500 donation. 22 other AT&T high fliers soon followed with their own checks.

Am I missing something here? Or do you have to be as cynical as I am to presume that these guys are literally buying their way out of trouble.

We all know that, thanks to the spinelessness of the Democrats, this immunity has now been granted to telecoms that broke the law and did so whilst being fully aware that they were breaking the law.

Now they have lined Rockerfellers pockets and- hey presto -they are immune from prosecution.

This is the kind of thing one expects to read about in reports from Zimbabwe, it's certainly not the kind of thing one would expect to be so blatantly done in the United States.

The charts alone tell their own story.

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Tags: Senator Rockerfeller, telecoms, donations, wiretapping, FISA, illegal wiretapping