So, Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) will not resign his office, has declared the allegations “outrageous”, and says that, while there are two sides to the story here, now is not the time to give that other side. Well, like James Carville and Dana Milbank, I’d like to know what that other side is. Seriously, you were videotaped by the FBI taking $100,000 in cash from an FBI agent as a bribe and then the FBI found $90,000 of that cash in your freezer. Now, Milbank in today’s Washington Post gives even more detail to the FBI sting:

He said it would be “extraordinarily foolhardy” to talk about the case. But, then again, it would not be the only foolhardy thing Jefferson had done lately. Didn’t he know that the Pentagon City complex where he was stung was an FBI favorite? Both Monica Lewinsky and Pentagon official Larry Franklin (of the AIPAC espionage affair) were undone by agents in the same place Jefferson put the $100,000 in his Lincoln Town Car while “video taped by the FBI from several vantage points.“

And now the congressman is claiming that the separation of powers has been violated in the search of his congressional office. Sorry congressman, but it’s not the time for indignant statements about the Constitution. It’s time to resign. And for all the other members of Congress who are claiming that this is some intrusion on the separation of powers I will let Justin Rood put you in your place:

Wow. After sitting largely silent for more than five years of assaults against citizens’ constitutional rights, our legislators have been moved to protect the Constitution because one of their own — a man who meets contacts in hotel parking lots to accept briefcases full of money, and actually kept $90,000 in cash bundled in his freezer — had his offices searched by the FBI.

Unbelievable. What ever happened to “law and order” politicians? A sitting Congressman acts like a drug smuggler and then the FBI gets attacked after they treat him how they have been told to treat alleged criminals. Congress has been dishing out criminal justice legislation that supports these kind of heavy handed techniques that are aimed at deterrence of future crimes and now it gets turned on them and they can’t take it. Boo hoo. Jefferson’s lucky he was just involved in an international bribery scheme that involves corrupting a public office and violating the public trust, further tarring the political process in the eyes of many Americans. If he was doing drugs he’d have been carried off to jail along with his belongings, which would then be sold at a profit for the police.