Patrick Murphy: Empty Suit

June 23, 2016

As Dan McLaughlin notes, the CBS affiliate in Miami, Florida did a thorough report on the life story of Democratic Senate candidate Patrick Murphy. What seems to have started as a standard profile piece on a House Democrat with greater ambitions turned into one of the great blockbusters of state-level political journalism, revealing that the two biggest pieces of Murphy's life story before getting elected to Congress in 2012 were, if not outright lies, extreme exaggerations.

In 2014, when he ran for re-election, he was asked in a debate to detail the professional and life experiences which qualify him to serve in Congress. "I would say my background as a CPA," he said. "Also being a small business owner, you know someone that can relate to those concerns of small business owners I think is particularly important."

Jim DeFade of CBS Miami finds:

Murphy has never held a CPA license in the state of Florida.

Instead, he obtained a license in Colorado. And because the requirements are lower in Colorado, Florida does not accept the license as valid in Florida. As a result, none of the work Murphy did in Florida for Deloitte & Touche was as a CPA.

His old boss wasn't exactly singing his praises:

CBS4 News contacted John Gordon, a partner at Deloitte & Touche in Miami, who oversaw Murphy's work and signed an affidavit on his application for a CPA license in Colorado stating that between 2007 and 2009 Murphy had completed the necessary number of hours of work to qualify for a CPA license under the rules in Colorado.

"Yeah, I think so," Gordon said when asked if he remembered Murphy. "I'm not really familiar with him."

"Not really familiar with him"? Does that seem odd? The years 2007 through 2009 weren't that long ago. Did this man have a lot of employees go on to become members of Congress? Nobody at the firm ever said, "Hey, remember our old audit assistant Patrick? He got elected to Congress!"

It gets worse; Murphy was never a small business owner; the records indicate he operated a small portion of his father's quite big and successful company, and he's been painting an inaccurate picture of the company for years.

In public, Murphy always said his business was "affiliated" with his father's business Coastal Construction, one of the largest construction companies in the country.

In fact, it is now apparent, Coastal Environmental was controlled and operated by Coastal Construction.

Incorporation papers show the depths to which Coastal Environmental and Coastal Construction are intertwined.

Patrick Murphy's father, Thomas Murphy, Jr., is the chairman and CEO of Coastal Construction and a director of Coastal Environmental.

Daniel Whiteman is not just President of Coastal Environmental; his primary role is vice chairman of Coastal Construction.

The corporate address for Coastal Environmental is the same as Coastal Construction.

It would appear that rather than start a small business that did work in the Gulf, Murphy, with the support of his father and Coastal Construction, acquired a business that was already doing the work. (Thomas Murphy did not return calls seeking his comment for this story.)

Murphy's so-called "small business" also only operated for a short time during the Gulf oil spill.

Coastal Environmental Services has not generated a dollar in revenue since the end of 2010.

Coastal Environmental has the four oil skimmers in storage in Louisiana and Alabama in case another disaster strikes. The campaign provided invoices to show the boats are in storage. Ironically, reviewing the invoices, the cost of storing the vessels for the last five years is more than the company claims to have made in profit during 2010.

In other words, it appears Coastal was not profitable. It likely lost money. And it continues to lose money to this day.

The report offers a devastating summation of the congressman: "Murphy's rise is extraordinary because of how little he seems to have accomplished to get here."

Shhh! Don't Bring Up The Fact That ISIS Is Inspiring American-Born Killers!

A president doesn't completely control the national debate, but he can steer it a great deal. President Obama would like us to not talk about the fact that ISIS is accomplishing something al-Qaeda could not, which is inspiring angry, deeply-troubled Muslims who are drifting into Islamist ideology to try to commit massacres.

Islamists have launched four terror attacks on American soil in the past 13 months: the Garland, Texas attack on a "draw Mohammed" contest, the Chattanooga shooting that killed four Marines and a Navy sailor, the San Bernardino attack that killed 14 people and injured 22 more, and now Orlando, where one gunman killed 49 people and injured 53 others.

Under a better president, we would be discussing this openly, rationally, but fully aware of the danger. As I discuss in this column, al-Qaeda was terrible, but they gave us an advantage with their obsession with big, complicated, long-in-the-works plots involving lots of people, lots of communications, financial transactions, and often a "hard target" like airplanes and national landmarks. ISIS looked at that and decided to just encourage any aspiring jihadist to strike however they can.

Obama has made a habit of declaring that ISIS is "not an existential threat to us," setting the bar at a level that only the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan have ever met. After the Brussels terror attack, on a trip to Argentina, Obama declared, "I addressed this issue a little bit at the baseball game when I was interviewed by ESPN, but let me reiterate it: Groups like [ISIS] can't destroy us. They can't produce anything."

This isn't correct. Right now ISIS is producing American-born mass killers.

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg offered a jarring comment about the president's perspective in his much-ballyhooed deep dive into his administration's foreign policy: "Obama believes that the clash is taking place within a single civilization, and that Americans are sometimes collateral damage in this fight between Muslim modernizers and Muslim fundamentalists."

There were no "Muslim modernizers" on the scene in Fort Hood or Boston or San Bernardino or Orlando. Americans weren't "collateral damage" in those attacks — they were deliberately targeted victims.

Two and a half years after his "JV" comment, there's painfully little evidence that Obama understands any of this better than he did then. How many more of our citizens must die before he gets it?

Look Who's Cashing In on the Iran Deal . . .

Our old friend Betsy Woodruff catches an Iran-deal advocate, part of the old Clinton team, who didn't feel it was necessary to disclose he was under contract to a company that just sealed a $25 billion contract with the Iranian government.

Thomas Pickering, one of the country's most respected diplomats and a and former ambassador to Israel and the United Nations, has been quietly taking money from Boeing while vocally supporting the Iran nuclear deal—testifying before Congress, writing letters to high-level officials, and penning op-eds for outlets like The Washington Post.

Pickering confirmed via email—from his Boeing corporate email address—that he was on staff at the company from 2001 to 2006 and has been a paid consultant for them ever since.

"I was a Boeing employee from 1/2001 to 6/2006," he emailed. "I was a direct consultant to Boeing from 7/2006 until 12/2015 when‎ contract for consulting was moved to Hills for my work."

"Hills" refers to Hills & Company International Consultants, where Pickering is a principal. In a previous email, Pickering referred to his "contract arrangement with Boeing" in the present tense.

He didn't respond to a follow-up email asking if he disclosed his relationship with Boeing when discussing Iran with members of Congress and with the press. The Daily Beast found no evidence that he made a habit of making such a disclosure, and will update this piece if we do.

If Pickering isn't still under contract or affiliated with Boeing, why is he using a Boeing corporate email address?

One wonders if he ever sent any arguments in favor of the Iran deal from that account.

ADDENDA: The late Jo Cox, the recently-assassinated Labour member of the U.K. parliament, in an interview conducted in February, discussing the refugee crisis in Europe and the civil war in Syria:

The Obama administration has actually been appalling on this. They've blocked action, and they've completely focused on first the Iranian nuclear deal, to the detriment of Syria, and now not focused enough on Syria, as in for Syria's sake, rather than their strategic relationships with Russia and Iran, and that's been a problem.