Shady Dealings

Washington loves liberal power couples. Remember Tina Brown and Harold Evans swooning over the Clintons? And the campaign Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson waged against the Bush White House?  Book deals and good favor are up for grabs to those who best play professional victim.

This year, attention must be paid to Robert Borosage and Barbara Shailor.

For the uninitiated, Borosage is “the president of the Institute for America’s Future and co-director of its sister organization, the Campaign for America’s Future.” (My guess is that he will be dedicated to securing victory for the Democrats in 2010.) Borosage is also a Contributing Editor to The Nation magazine.

Barbara Shailor is the Director of International Affairs for the AFL-CIO.

Here’s the catch: Shailor has allegedly been funneling money to her husband’s causes, in an apparently illegal move.

In 2005, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation asked the Labor Department to examine Shailor:

[National Right to Work Legal Defense] Foundation attorneys have discovered that the AFL-CIO’s Director of International Affairs, Barbara Shailor, has never filed the mandatory union disclosure forms on which she must disclose compensation received by her husband, Robert Borosage, from the "Campaign for America's Future" (CAF), an organization which he founded and leads. She also must disclose that her husband’s organization has received at least $130,000 in payments from the AFL-CIO in recent years.

Now, to bring us up to date: I’ve learned from sources in Washington that Shailor has been recommended to be the new State Department Special Representative for International Labor Affairs.  This position does not require Senate confirmation, but she is being vetted nonetheless.  If this rumor is true, one hopes that the Obama administration has learned from previous mistakes—and that she won’t be working for the government anytime soon.