Politics
Out of context: Reply #9251
- Started
- Last post
- 33,772 Responses
- ukit0
This Wall Street Journal profile of Alan Grayson from three years ago is pretty interesting...turns out the guy isn't just a rabble rouser, he's accomplished a lot prior to being a Congressman
http://online.wsj.com/public/art…
From his home office in a pink-painted mansion here, lawyer Alan Grayson is waging a one-man war against contractor fraud in Iraq.
Mr. Grayson has filed dozens of lawsuits against Iraq contractors on behalf of corporate whistle-blowers. He won a huge victory last month when a federal jury in Virginia ordered a security firm called Custer Battles LLC to return $10 million in ill-gotten funds to the government. The ruling marked the first time an American firm was held responsible for financial improprieties in Iraq.
A fierce critic of the war in Iraq, Mr. Grayson drives an aging Cadillac emblazoned with antiadministration bumper stickers such as "Bush Lied, People Died." He says the administration's botched handling of Iraq opened the door for corrupt contractors to improperly reap fortunes there. At a hearing in February 2005 held by Democratic senators, Mr. Grayson asserted that the administration had "not lifted a finger to recover tens of millions of dollars our whistle-blowers allege was stolen from the government."
His opinions on the matter haven't shifted since. "The Bush administration has made a conscious decision to sweep the cases under the rug for as long as possible," he says today. "And the more bad news that comes out of Iraq, the more motivation they have to do so."
For the contractors in his cross hairs, Mr. Grayson, 48, is a formidable opponent. He received his undergraduate, master's and law degrees from Harvard. He made millions during a two-year stint as the president of IDT Corp., a start-up that has since grown into one of the nation's largest providers of discount telecommunications services. Mr. Grayson says he has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal funds into his small eight-person law firm to help defray the costs of pursuing Iraq fraud cases that may not make it to trial for years. "I have deep enough pockets to subsidize the legal work," he says.