To Break All Laws
Roll Call Staff
To Break All Laws. It turns out the jury duty dust-up involving Anupama Rangappa, a campaign aide to Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), wasn’t her first brush with the law.
Rangappa was briefly jailed by a D.C. Superior Court judge last month for skipping out on jury duty to attend a Kerry event in Iowa. She eventually pleaded guilty to a contempt charge and was fined $1,000. Rangappa will also do 120 hours of community service and write a 25-page essay on the importance of jury duty, according to The Washington Post.
But political involvement has intertwined with Rangappa ending up on the wrong side of the law before. In March 2000, Rangappa, working on then-Vice President Al Gore’s campaign for the White House, was pulled over and arrested in Nashville, Tenn., for suspicion of drunken driving.
According to an article published at the time in The Memphis Commercial Appeal, Officer Joseph Simonik alleged that Rangappa threatened to use her political connections against him after he stopped her.
Simonik, who stopped Rangappa’s car after observing it travelling 85 mph in a 40 mph zone and subsequently smelled alcohol on her breath, claimed Rangappa tried to intimidate him.
“I am on the Gore 2000 campaign and I’m going to call the United States district attorney right now,” Rangappa reportedly told Simonik, according to the arrest report. Rangappa failed a field sobriety test and refused to take a blood-alcohol test.
Rangappa, who was also a White House intern (in the same crop with Monica Lewinsky) before moving over to the Gore campaign, is now an employee of the Dewey Square Group, which has a contract with the Kerry campaign.
Rangappa declined to comment.
“Anu is a friend of this campaign and understands she made a bad decision that has been dealt with by the courts,” said Kerry spokesman Robert Gibbs.
Odd Couple. Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), who doesn’t exactly have a reputation as a good quote around town, should provide quite a challenge for author Jonathan Franzen.
Franzen, whose 2001 novel of a modern family in disarray, “The Corrections,” won widespread critical acclaim, has been tasked with profiling the Speaker for “Quite Possibly the Best Magazine Ever.”
Hastert and Franzen recently sat down together for a 35-minute interview in the Speaker’s Capitol office for The New Yorker piece, and Franzen also traveled to Aurora, Ill., over the weekend to observe Hastert in an Independence Day parade. Franzen and Hastert went to Cleveland as well, where they attended a recent fundraiser for freshman Rep. Chris Chocola (R-Ind.).
The noted author even huddled with House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who himself is not known as being a huge fan of the press, for the profile.
HOH wanted to know whether Hastert had any concerns about meeting with Franzen, who garnered national headlines for snubbing another well-known Illinoisian, Oprah Winfrey, when he turned down a chance to appear on her show to talk about his book, deeming it an unsuitable forum to discuss “real” literature.
Hastert spokesman John Feehery pointed out that Franzen was born in Chicago and raised in St. Louis, giving him strong Midwestern credentials despite Franzen’s reputation as a New York intellectual.
“He’s a fascinating fellow. I’m sure he’ll write a fascinating profile of the Speaker,” Feehery said.
New Digs. It isn’t exactly a happy ending, but the sad story of former Rep. Parren Mitchell’s (D-Md.) nursing home care appears to have come to a conclusion.
Energy and Commerce Committee: Barton Holds the Line for the GOP
March 15, 12 a.m.
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) knows he’s outnumbered. He knows the Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where he serves as ranking member, have the ability to “slam things through” when they want to. Read Full Article
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