February, 14 2013, 11:14am EDT
Ask Your Senators to Request an Ethics Committee Investigation of Senator Dianne Feinstein Now
WASHINGTON
Shortly after San Francisco's then-Mayor Feinstein married private equity financier Richard C. Blum in 1980, those who knew them called theirs "a marriage of the public and private sectors."
When Blum spent a reported $3 million in a failed attempt to make his wife Governor of California in 1990, he pledged that if she were elected he would do everything necessary to avoid "even the appearance of conflict [of interest]," but the couple has consistently been dogged with concerns about malfeasance.
Although Feinstein lost her gubernatorial bid to Republican Pete Wilson, she soon took his seat in the U.S. Senate. Working across the aisle, her power rapidly grew along with her husband's diversified investments and their mutual wealth.
* As Chair and ranking member of the Military Construction and Appropriations Subcommittee, Senator Feinstein appears to have steered contracts to companies controlled by her husband.2 Blum has profited handsomely from military contracts.
* In 2009, Senator Feinstein introduced legislation to provide $25 billion in taxpayer money to the FDIC after it gave Blum's CBRE real estate company a contract to sell foreclosed properties at unusually high rates.
* As a Regent of the University of California, Blum appears to have profited from contracts with the UC-run nuclear weapons laboratory at Los Alamos.
* In the summer of 2012, the U.S. Postal Service awarded Blum's CBRE company the exclusive contract to sell its portfolio of public properties. Feinstein's office denies any influence in the awarding of the contract.
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