Lawmakers and U.S. government regulators investigating the massive recall of the world’s largest automaker may have difficulty being objective because they have financial ties to the company, tight friendships with its top executives and precious factories that greatly benefit their home state.

The federal legislators leading the investigation of Toyota's colossal safety violations include a senator (West Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller), who practically jumped through hoops to lure the Japanese automaker to his state and a famously rich congresswoman (California Democrat Jane Harman), who owes much of her wealth to Toyota, according to a news report published this week. Harman also represents the district—Torrance California—of Toyota's U.S. headquarters in the House and holds tens of thousands of dollars in company stock with her husband.

Rockefeller, Harman and others on the congressional committees probing Toyota represent states where the automaker has factories and the crucial manufacturing jobs they bring to communities. As chairman of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, Rockefeller is the Senate’s lead Toyota investigator yet he’s been tight with the company’s founding family for decades and proudly boasts about luring a much-ballyhooed Toyota factory to West Virginia in the 1990s.

Now Rockefeller's committee will review whether the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration acted aggressively enough toward the automaker. The agency's new chief, David L. Strickland, is also tight with Rockefeller and worked for eight years on the senator’s committee as a lawyer and senior staffer. The probe involves the recall of nearly 10 million vehicles over acceleration issues and brake problems. 

Harmon is an influential member of the House committee (Energy and Commerce) that’s leading the widespread Toyota probe even though she has a clear conflict of interest in the matter. She and her husband, Sidney, admit owing much of their multimillion-dollar fortune to Toyota and the couple owns a lucrative business that sells vehicle audio and entertainment systems to the automaker. 

Toyota is also well connected with top company officials that include former presidential cabinet members, prominent government officials and influential former federal legislators. Among them is Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Energy and Transportation (Federico Pena), also co-chairman of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, Clinton Labor Secretary Alexis Herman and former Republican congresswoman Susan Molinari. 

A convicted felon cannot be deported because tattooed criminals like him are often harassed by gangs and police in his native El Salvador, according to a federal appellate court that overruled both an immigration judge and the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals.

The preposterous ruling was issued a few days ago by the abhorrently liberal and frequently overturned 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The case involves a violent multiple offender from El Salvador (Gregory Aguilar-Ramos) who has been convicted in the United States of serious crimes, including robbery and theft with priors. 

As a child the felon became a U.S. resident but, under federal law, his felony convictions require he be deported. In 2005 the Department of Homeland Security began the process, citing his conviction of an aggravated felony and two violent crimes of moral turpitude. A year later Aguilar-Ramos sought asylum, claiming that he feared gangs and police in El Salvador would target him because of his “multiple tattoos” and “status as a deportee from the United States.” 

An immigration judge denied the petition, citing the criminal’s failure to prove that he faced torture in his native country. The Board of Immigration Appeals, the nation’s highest administrative body for interpreting and applying immigration laws, agreed with the decision and Aguilar-Ramos appealed to the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit. The case was argued in the southern California city of Pasadena a few months ago.

The sympathetic three-judge panel based its decision largely on the testimony of an “expert” who monitors gangs and police in El Salvador. He testified that deportees like Aguilar face years in jail, death or serious injury in prison as well as harassment by police or military patrols. In some cases, they face “death squads” that operate with the awareness of the government,” according to the 10-page ruling. 

Before deporting Aguilar to El Salvador immigration officials must seriously consider that police and gangs in the tiny Central American nation harass, persecute and kill tattooed criminal deportees like him, the decision says. 

These sorts of outrageous rulings are par for the course for the western appeals court, the largest of the nation’s 13 appellate courts. The 9th Circuit is best known for getting overturned by the Supreme Court more than any other. This term alone, the High Court reversed 94% of its rulings in cases involving issues such as civil rights, prisoners’ rights and environmental protection. 

Last year the 9th Circuit Court’s chief justice, Alex Kozinski, was embroiled in an embarrassing scandal for operating a publicly accessible website containing sexually explicit and offensive images. The judge’s salacious website became an issue in the obscenity trial of a Hollywood adult filmmaker that he presided over.

Although it’s illegal to fund abortions with federal dollars, the Department of Defense will for the first time in history offer a controversial abortion pill at U.S. military bases worldwide.

Best known as the morning after pill, Plan B One-Step will soon become a standard part of every military medical facility’s drug stock, including those in crucial Middle East locations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The decision to provide female enlistees with the “emergency contraception” was based on a recommendation by an independent advisory panel of military doctors and pharmacists known as the Pentagon’s Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee. 

The committee’s recommendation was approved last week by the Pentagon's acting assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, Allen Middleton. In November the panel received an anonymous request to consider adding the emergency abortion pill as a mandatory drug in Defense Department health facilities, according to minutes from its meeting. The order could have easily come from the Secretary of State, who as a New York senator, pushed hard to make the pill available without a prescription. Judicial Watch filed a public records lawsuit in the matter.   

Many military hospitals across the country have carried the abortion medication since the Food and Drug Administration approved it in 2006, but the new recommendations will require all Pentagon health facilities to stock it as a “core formulary” which means hospital commanders don’t have the discretion to exclude it. The Department of Defense already offers contraception options such as condoms and birth control pills for all soldiers.  

In accordance with federal law, military hospitals are forbidden from performing abortions. Since 1996 the U.S. government has banned (Hyde Amendment) the use of federal dollars to pay for abortions, though some states use local resources to fund the procedure. The federal ban applies to government health programs for the disabled and elderly (Medicare) and the poor (Medicaid). A separate provision, known as the Smith Amendment, prohibits federal funding of abortion under the federal employees’ health benefits plan.

The contentious abortion issue has already derailed controversial healthcare bills recently presented in Congress. The House legislation passed by a narrow margin only after an amendment was inserted banning federal funds for the procedure. The long-stalled Senate bill offers to levy a new “abortion premium” fee on Americans in the government-run plan.  

A prominent New York politician who served in the state assembly for three decades is the latest on a growing list of corrupt state lawmakers who in recent years have been convicted of crimes or forced to quit by allegations of wrongdoing.

Democrat Anthony Seminerio will go to jail for six years for operating a massive, decade-long bribery scheme in which he shook down individuals and organizations doing business with the state. The popular and highly influential legislator, who represented southwest Queens, took at least $1 million in exchange for actions he took as a public official.

The FBI has wiretaps of Seminerio, who regularly used profanity to accentuate his thug-like antics, referring to himself as a sort of mafia “godfather” and bluntly asking for a bribe from a health executive who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for his influence in the state legislature. A lot of the money was funneled through a “consulting” firm Seminerio created years ago.  

At his sentencing this week, a Manhattan federal judge chastised the disgraced politician, reminding him that he “decided to take a piece of the action.” The judge described in detail how the corrupt lawmaker “accepted bribes and engaged in extortion as part of a decade-long scheme to use his office—both literally and figuratively—for personal gain and at the expense of the public trust.”

Just few months ago another veteran New York politician, former senate majority leader Joseph Bruno, was convicted for taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes. The Republican legislator also abused his position as one of New York’s most powerful political leaders to make millions more in “consulting fees” that he failed to disclose. 

Nearly a decade after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, large amounts of dirty foreign cash—often used to support terrorism—keep flowing into the country thanks to major loopholes in a 2001 law passed to curtail money laundering.

Corrupt foreign officials and their relatives regularly exploit the gaps in the largely ineffective post-9/11 measure to funnel millions of dollars into the United States, according to a Senate Homeland Security panel investigation. The committee issued an alarming 330-page report this week detailing how illicit foreign money regularly enters the U.S.

The laundered funds are in turn used to train and provide support for terrorists and terrorism, according to the Michigan Democrat (Carl Levin) who heads the bipartisan panel called the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. The tainted money has also been used in bribery schemes involving corrupt U.S. politicians. 

Wealthy crooked foreigners and government officials use lawyers, real estate and escrow agents, lobbyists, bankers and even college administrators to skirt the money laundering law and bring tens of millions of dollars into the U.S. Examples include the son of the president of Equatorial Guinea, who brought in $110 million in suspect money over a four-year span, according to the investigation.

An Angolan arms dealer, who is currently in a French prison, for years maintained dozens of U.S. bank accounts handling some $60 million in transactions. The notoriously corrupt president of a poverty-stricken west central African country (Gabon) used an American lobbyist to move nearly $20 million and to purchase U.S.-made armored vehicles and Saudi military cargo aircrafts. 

At least one of the cases listed in the detailed senate report involves a criminally convicted U.S. congressman from Louisiana, William Jefferson, who is serving a 13-year sentence for operating a massive bribery scheme. Among the disgraced politician’s operatives was Nigeria’s vice president, who smuggled more than $40 million of “suspect funds” into the U.S. 

Siding with powerful business interests that profit from hiring illegal aliens, a federal appellate court has struck down as unconstitutional key employment provisions in Oklahoma’s strict immigration control law.

The 2007 measure (Oklahoma Taxpayer and City Protection Act) aims to curtail the state’s illegal immigration crisis by limiting public benefits to illegal aliens, requiring deportation for those arrested and cracking down on businesses that employ them. That portion of the law subjects employers to stiff penalties if they are caught hiring illegal immigrants.

It prohibits firing workers who are in the U.S. legally while retaining undocumented workers, requires businesses to obtain documents proving that employees of private contractors are authorized to work in the country and requires companies with government contracts to use a federal database known as E-Verify to check eligibility of job seekers. 

In mid 2008 a federal judge (Robin Cauthron) in Oklahoma City blocked all three employment provisions, ruling that the state measure preempts federal law on immigration and that the state cannot create or impose guidelines that conflict with the Constitution or federal law. 

The state appealed and this week the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down two of the three employer stipulations, essentially agreeing with the lower court’s assessment that they cannot be enforced and are likely unconstitutional. Businesses forced to comply with the law will face significant risk of suffering financial harm, the justices wrote in their decision. 

Influential state and national business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, filed the lawsuit in an effort to get rid of the measure. However, the appellate court did rule in favor of the portion of Oklahoma’s law that requires employers with government contracts to use E-Verify to check the eligibility of its workers.  

Last October a different federal judge (James Payne) dismissed a separate lawsuit aimed at killing Oklahoma’s law, which also denies state identification cards to illegal immigrants, in its entirety. Filed on behalf of a group of anonymous illegal immigrants, that suit claimed that the state measure discriminates against all immigrants but Judge Payne disagreed.

In his strongly worded ruling, Judge Payne said that anonymous illegal alien plaintiffs do not have standing or the right to sue to prevent the law’s implementation. He also pointed out that the illegal immigrants filed the suit in order to remove any barriers the state had erected to their continued violation of federal laws. “These illegal alien plaintiffs seek nothing more than to use this court as a vehicle for their continued unlawful presence in this country,” he wrote.

A man impersonating a federal agent easily slipped past security at a major southern California airport, marking the latest of many embarrassing gaffes for the famously inept government agency charged with securing the nation’s transportation system.

The serious breach happened in San Diego and the scariest part is that the federal agency that got duped, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), didn’t learn about it until local police discovered it weeks later. The phony U.S. Marshal presented fake law enforcement documents to enter secure areas of the airport with a woman he claimed was a prisoner, according to the local news report that broke the story. 

After escorting his bogus prisoner to the gate and boarding her on a flight, the man simply walked out of San Diego International Airport, which annually serves millions of passengers, and returned home. Shortly after, he was arrested by local police and charged with kidnapping, false imprisonment and impersonating a peace officer. 

The TSA was totally clueless about the breach until local law enforcement authorities notified it. Shocked agency officials claim they are investigating and “working with law enforcement and other departments to make sure this does not happen again.” 

This sort of negligence seems to be par for the course at the scandal-plagued TSA, the 50,000-employee agency created after the 2001 terrorist attacks mainly to protect airlines. Although it has received hundreds of millions of dollars from Congress to fulfill its mission, the agency is best known for its mishaps and, in many cases, negligence.

Various Homeland Security Inspector General probes have determined that the TSA leaves airplanes vulnerable to terrorist attacks by failing to ensure the security of cargo packages and not adequately conducting background checks or training for agency workers who handle cargo. Dozens of other security failures have been documented over the years in other crucial areas nationwide, including TSA workers at three major airports missing hundreds of fake bombs during a covert exercise to determine if suspicious items could be smuggled into secure areas.

In the last few months alone, the TSA made headlines for giving security badges to a dozen illegal immigrants who had presented fake documents to work in sensitive areas of a busy U.S. airport and allowing a severely ill man with tuberculosis to board a 2,600-mile flight even though his name appeared on a Homeland Security “do-not-board” list. 

To avoid a scandalous public corruption trial that would have featured testimony from some of the most influential politicians in Texas (among them a member of Bill Clinton’s cabinet), a veteran state lawmaker has pleaded guilty to fraud in connection with a bribery scheme. 

The operation involves the convicted mayor pro tem (Don Hill) and planning commissioner (D’Angelo Lee) of Dallas. Both crooked officials steered low-income housing deals to a developer in exchange for bribes. The same developer also bribed Democratic state Congresswoman Terri Hodge for her influence in getting lucrative tax credits for the low-income housing projects. 

Hodge, who has represented Dallas in the Texas House for more than a decade, is a well-known criminal justice reform advocate who wields tremendous power in state politics. She was charged with eight bribery counts, five fraud counts and one conspiracy count in a 2007 indictment that also accuses more than a dozen other public officials and their associates with offenses related to the Dallas affordable housing bribery plot.

Hodge pleaded guilty this week to the lesser charges of fraud and making false statements on her tax returns. The agreement with federal prosecutors also says she must resign her legislative position and never seek future public office. The highly popular congresswoman now faces three years in jail, a $100,000 fine and restitution to the Internal Revenue Service for cheating it out of tax dollars.

The plea brought a collective sigh of relief at Dallas City Hall, which has been rocked by a tidal wave of public corruption in the last few years. Billed as one of the biggest political spectacles in Dallas history, the now-cancelled trial’s witness list included state heavyweights in local politics, the United States Congress and a presidential cabinet member (former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros who went on to become Clinton’s Housing Secretary).