New Weiner scandal: license plate fraud?
Hotair ^ | June 13, 2011 | Ed Morrissey
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The one thing we can’t say with certitude is that Anthony Weiner has been registering his vehicles with the DMV. The New York Daily News did a little investigating after seeing expired tags on his Nissan Pathfinder, and discovered that not only has the car not been registered, but the plates on them belong to a different car (via JWF):
When Weiner (D-Queens, Brooklyn) was photographed by the Daily News fleeing the Capitol in his Nissan Pathfinder, it was clear the July 2007 registration sticker in his window was expired, and there was no inspection sticker to be seen. Weiner, through a staffer, said the 1988 Nissan Pathfinder was registered in New York State.
Not so, said the state Department of Motor Vehicles.
The New York license plate bolted on Weiner’s Pathfinder - US Congress 9 – had expired as of 2006, according to the DMV.
“That license plate should not be on a car,” a DMV spokeswoman said. It wasn’t even issued to the Pathfinder, but to another one of Weiner’s cars, a Honda, according to vehicle records.
As abuses of power go, this one is decidedly tamer than the scandal surrounding Weiner the last couple of weeks. Still, as one investigator told the NYDN, swapping plates is something one would normally expect of a criminal, not a member of Congress. Or is that a redundancy?
This new peek into Weiner’s approach to responsibility may lend itself less to double entendres and hilarious jokes, but it may also be more revealing. Until now, Weiner earned $174,000 in annual salary as a Congressman. His wife earns almost the same amount working for Hillary Clinton, putting their combined household income at a figure exceeding $325,000 per year. Weiner has agitated for higher taxes and more government regulation, but has apparently evaded his responsibility to pay for fees owed the state of New York for the last four years — even switching plates to save himself a few hundred dollars.
If that’s less sexy than Weiner’s social-networking scandal (in all senses of the word), it speaks more directly to a ruling-clique sensibility and utter hypocrisy.
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Culture of corruption.
