You Don't Want Your Leader Cooperating With The FBI

I don't think it's ever good for a political party when the chairman you just elected last week is in the papers saying he will cooperate with the FBI. It doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele said Sunday that he would provide records from his 2006 U.S. Senate campaign to the FBI in an effort to speed an apparent investigation into allegations of improper campaign spending.

Steele confirmed that his sister was recently contacted by FBI agents looking into allegations that his campaign paid a company she owned more than $37,000 in 2007 for campaign work that was never performed. The allegations were made by Steele's former campaign finance chairman in an attempt to gain a more lenient prison sentence after he was convicted of fraud in an unrelated case [...]

"I want to clear up my good name. This is not the way I intend to run the RNC, with this over my head. We're going to dispense with it immediately," he said.

I seem to remember a lot of stories when Howard Dean first won the DNC chair about how he was going to be a wreck for the party (as opposed to soundly winning two election cycles and growing the party in every state), especially because he would make some unfortunate statements and get in the newspapers sullying the image of the party all the time.

Has anyone written that story yet about Steele?