WHO TO BELIEVE – AN ADMIRAL OR A GUY FROM CHICAGO?

Somebody’s lying.  It probably isn’t Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa.  But he’s the one most likely to suffer from it.   No sooner had he won an upset victory over Sen. Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania‘s Democrat primary than he was caught up in a "he said, she said" with the Obama administration.

In an interview Feb. 18 with Philadelphia talk show host Larry Kane, Rep. Sestak, a retired Navy admiral, said he’d been offered a job in the administration if he would drop his plans to challenge Sen. Arlen Specter.

Mr. Sestak said the offer came last summer, but wouldn’t say who made it, or what job he was offered.

This sort of thing isn’t rare in politics, though the Obama administration appears to do it more often, and do it more clumsily than earlier administrations.  (The Denver Post reported last September that former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff was offered a job in the Obama administration if he would drop his plans to challenge Sen. Michael Bennet in the Democrat primary.  He didn’t accept.)

Subtlety is required in tendering such offers, because if someone in the administration did offer Rep. Sestak a job, that person committed a crime.  The relevant statutes are 18 USC 600: "Whoever, directly or indirectly, promises any employment, appointment or other benefit…as consideration, favor or reward for…any political activity…in connection with any primary election….shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both." 

And 18 USC 595: "Whoever, being a person employed in any administrative position by the United States…uses his official authority for the purpose of interfering with, or affecting the nomination or the election of any candidate for the office of…Member of the Senate…shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both."

It is also, as Sen. Specter eagerly pointed out, a violation of the law (misprision of a felony) for Rep. Sestak not to have reported the bribe offer to law enforcement.

On CNN Monday (5/24), White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod acknowledged that if someone in the White House offered Rep. Sestak a job in exchange for dropping out of the race, it was a big deal:

"If such things happened, they would constitute a serious breach of the law," Mr. Axelrod said.

But the White House counsel had "looked into" the allegations, he said, and "there was no evidence of such a thing."

Indirectly, Mr. Axelrod was accusing Rep. Sestak of lying.

This puts Rep. Sestak between a rock and a hard place, where I don’t think he belongs.  If there was a bribe, he didn’t solicit it, or accept it.

And I can’t imagine he made up the story.  What would he possibly have to gain?  I have no use for Rep. Sestak’s politics, but he seems an honest and straightforward man.  In any event, his reputation for openness and candor is considerably greater than that of the Obama administration. 

That reputation for candor will suffer if Rep. Sestak doesn’t provide very soon the critical details: 

What job was he offered?  (The scuttlebutt is that it was Secretary of the Navy.) 

Who offered it? (The Denver Post said it was Deputy White House Chief of Staff Jim Messina who offered Andrew Romanoff a job if he would drop out of the primary in Colorado.) 

What were the words the job offerer used? (Other than to satisfy gossip-mongerers, this last doesn’t matter all that much, because 18 USC 600 says that anyone who offers a job "directly or indirectly" is in violation of the law.

Mr. Sestak understandably doesn’t want to rat out a president of his own party, or one of the president’s chief aides. But with the Republicans talking about a special prosecutor, and even the New York Times and CNN asking questions, stonewalling won’t work.  He must come clean, or this issue will dog him for the rest of the campaign.

"Joe ought to be more forthcoming," Pat Toomey, his Republican opponent in the senate race, said on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" program Wednesday (5/26).  "He ought to tell us what happened and get this behind us.  I think I can beat Joe Sestak totally on our policy differences, but we’ve got this huge distraction.  He ought to just come out and say it."

But given how unpopular Obamacare, cap and trade and the stimulus bill are in Pennsylvania, perhaps Rep. Sestak would rather not talk about the bribe offer than to talk about his votes for those bills.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.