Mansiongate

SDP offers a full summary of the Mansiongate story here. He also offers a glimpse of the mansion here. Anyway, read the full summary, which is very useful. Excerpt:

We now know that on August 14, 2003, the day AFTER Jeff Gannon broke the story about Tom Daschle receiving the homestead deduction, the application for the deduction was amended so that Linda Daschle's signature appeared on the application rather than her husband's signature. This amendment to the application enabled the Daschle camp to tell Roll Call that it was Linda Daschle who was eligible to receive this homestead tax on behalf of the Daschles. Of course, the Daschle camp neglected to tell Roll Call that the application had been amended to show only Linda Daschle's signature only four days before, and that it was Tom Daschle's signature that had appeared on the application until a pesky reporter started sniffing around.

In early September, Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth wrote a column for NRO under the headline "Tom’s House Is a Very, Very, Very Nice House" noting the irony of Senator Daschle taking steps to avoid paying taxes while "fighting like a pit bull" to prevent the Bush tax cuts.

Of course, none of this activity was so much as mentioned in the Argus Leader, or any of the South Dakota press, until this week. This story percolated for over a year, until the indefatigable Jeff Gannon once again did some investigative work on the matter, making a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for a copy of the Daschles' application for the DC homestead deduction. Gannon made the FOIA request on September 29, 2004. When he received a copy of the application for the homestead deduction, it had only Tom Daschle's signature on it. ...

At the end of Gannon's story reporting the findings in his FOIA request, Gannon noted that an intriguing action had been taken by the DC government. "Since the FOIA request was filed on September 29, 2004," Gannon reported, "the DC Tax and Revenue web site has been updated to indicate that the Daschle property is "Not receiving the Homestead Deduction." But in a fascinating twist, the very next day the DC Tax and Revenue web site reflected that Daschle was "currently receiving the Homestead Deduction."

Wouldn't it be nice if some, ahem, South Dakota reporter actually tried to find out what was going on in the DC tax office?