John McCain and his little drug problem called Cindy McCain are back in the news. Matt Stoller has unearthed a potentially explosive story concerning John McCain, Cindy McCain, the DEA, and obstruction of justice. Ru-oh, if this story ever leaks out into the broader corporate media, McCain will have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do. He might want to hide out in one of his houses for a while.
A whistleblower is coming forth against John and Cindy McCain, and the picture he is painting is not a pretty one. You’ve probably heard about Cindy McCain stealing prescription drugs from her charity in the 1990s. Today, Tom Gosinski, her former employee and a close friend of the McCain’s, came out on the record about the entire sordid episode. And it appears that McCain used his Senate staff and resources to cover up Cindy’s drug use, and potentially to prevent the Drug Enforcement Agency from investigating his wife’s theft of illegal prescription drugs. John McCain certainly used his political connections to begin a campaign of intimidation against Gosinski, because at the time – this was after the Keating 5 scandal – another major scandal would have derailed his career. Gosinski stayed quiet out of fear until today; a recent fight with cancer has strengthened his resolve. As he told me today, if he can beat cancer, he can go on the record regarding how the McCain’s do business.
[From Open Left:: Did McCain Tamper with the Drug Enforcement Agency to Protect His Career?]
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The charity was supposed to conduct medical missions abroad, but Cindy was also stealing from the charity’s supply of drugs for her own personal use. In August of 1994, the story was going to come out, and so John McCain came out with his side of the story. He claimed he didn’t know that Cindy McCain was using drugs until 1994, a clear lie. Cindy McCain overdosed in 1991, and John McCain went to the hospital in Sedona and told the hospital staff not to make the information about Cindy public. Gosinski heard about the overdose in 1992, after he began work for Cindy McCain.
There are lots of unanswered questions, but the basic contours of the story are clear. John McCain used his position as a Senator to help his wife abuse illegal drugs and avoid being searched by customs, and somehow his wife managed to avoid any charges by the DEA or the state (which has mandatory minimums in cases like this) on drug charges despite ample evidence. Did the DEA or the state not file charges against her because of political pressure? Did they keep this on the Federal level to avoid mandatory minimums for Cindy McCain because of political pressure from McCain? Did John McCain and/or his Senate staff tamper with a criminal investigation of his wife and her conspiracy to fraudulently obtain illegal drugs?
Whether illegal or not, and an investigation by Congress should happen, this is clearly a massive and overreaching case of both corruption on a personal sordid level and an abuse of power.
Plenty more details, and some YouTube interview footage, here Silly kids, drug busts only happen to those earning under $5,000,000 a year.
via – Pam Spaulding, who writes:
And there’s much more, so click over. So how is the McCain campaign going to try to weasel out from under this? There are too many landmines in this story that will result in questions Straight Talk McCain will have to answer. There should be a Congressional investigation into this, given the gravity of the situation and the questions raised about the abuse of power. What does this thuggery say about how McCain will behave in the White House? How many other people may be persecuted with our taxpayer dollars under his orders?
If there’s one thing that the McCain camp wants to avoid is anything that deviates from the milked-to-death image of John McCain as the “Maverick” and patriotic POW, and neither of those labels applies to the insider, backstabbing, petty man using his power to destroy someone to protect his reputation and image because of his drug-addled wife’s “little problem” that was about to break wide open. This is The Real McCain, and it’s time for voters to see this image before they go to the polls.
This story needs to be driven hard – is this the kind of change McCain/Palin plan to bring to Washington? He looks an awful lot like the long list of corrupt GOP officials we’ve been dealing with since Cindy was popping pills back in the day.