A Treasury Department probe cast a wider net than previously known, according to NBC News, to collect information on advocacy by multiple American former politicians and officials for a controversial exiled Iranian opposition group. Last Friday, the Washington Times broke the story that former Democratic Party leader and Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell’s speakers’ bureau received a subpoena.

The stories relate the former officials’ advocacy to have the Mojahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) — a group with a long and winding history that was founded as an armed revolutionary group in Iran in the 1960s — removed from the U.S. State Department’s list of “foreign terrorist organizations.”

In addition to Rendell, NBC reports, Treasury’s Department of Foreign Assets Control, which enforces sanctions and international financial regulations, also requested records from the speakers’ bureaus of former F.B.I. head Louis Freeh and former Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton. Shelton denied wrong doing:

We’re all pretty miffed. None of us involved in this would say a good word about anyone suspected of being a terrorist.

But the MEK is not only suspected to be a terrorist group, they are designated as such by the U.S. government. (That designation is under review because of a court order, but no decision on reinstating or withdrawing it has been forthcoming from the State Department.) An Obama administration official speaking to NBC made the point:

This is about finding out where the money is coming from. This has been a source of enormous concern for a long time now. You have to ask the question, whether this is a prima facie case of material support for terrorism.

Many of the some 40 former officials who advocate for the MEK to be delisted receive high speaking fees for speeches to pro-MEK conferences and rallies both in the United States and in Europe, where the leadership of the group is based. Further complicating matters, some of the speakers work with stateside groups that support the MEK, but are not part of the organization itself. The NBC story, however, mentions at least one incident — which it suggests was a catalyst for the wider probe — where the political wing of the MEK, the National Council for Resistance in Iran (also a designated terror group), worked directly with U.S. speakers’ bureaus:

A small Pennsylvania-based speakers firm called Speakers Access wrote an email in September inviting a Washington based national security expert to speak at a conference in Geneva, Switzerland “on behalf of our client, National Council of Resistance of Iran, Foreign Affairs Committee.”

Reporter Justin Elliott, at the time with Salon, broke a similar story in September of a different speakers’ bureau that was offering cash for speaking engagements on behalf of the NCRI.

In a Wall Street Journal oped last month, Mitt Romney laid out “how I’ll respond to a China’s rising power” and criticized the Obama administration’s handling of relations with Beijing. Romney warns of a China as a regional hegemon:

The character of the Chinese government — one that marries aspects of the free market with suppression of political and personal freedom — would become a widespread and disquieting norm.

In the op-ed, the former Massachusetts governor also criticized Obama for failing to press Beijing on human rights and intellectual property violations.

While Romney is quick to criticize Beijing and the White House’s management of U.S.-China relations, an examination of the GOP frontrunner’s investments with Bain Capital — a company he co-founded and once led — suggest he has profited from Chinese surveillance of its own citizenry and from companies that have engaged in intellectual property theft.

The New York Times revealed yesterday that a Bain-run fund in which a Romney family blind trust had holdings purchased Uniview Technologies in December, a Chinese company that claims to be the biggest supplier of surveillance cameras to the Chinese government. Uniview produces “infrared antiriot” cameras and software that allow police to share images in real time and provided technology for an emergency command center in Tibet that “provides a solid foundation for the maintenance of social stability and the protection of people’s peaceful life,” according to Uniview’s Web site.

Human rights advocates say that the rapidly growing number of surveillance cameras in Chinese cities are used to intimidate political and religious activists. “There are video cameras all over our monastery, and their only purpose is to make us feel fear,” Loksag, a Tibetan Buddhist monk in Gansu Province told the Times. He said the cameras helped the authorities identify and detain nearly 200 monks who participated in a protest at his monastery in 2008.

Romney has said he has no role in Bain’s operations but a financial disclosure form filed last August showed that his wife, Ann Romney, held a $100,000 to $250,000 investment in the Bain Capital Asia Fund that purchased Uniview.

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Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA) introduced a bill in December that would freeze federal hiring in order to delay military spending cuts required by sequestration. Last month, Arizona GOP Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl introduced a similar bill that would scale back the federal work force and freeze federal worker pay to prevent further military spending cuts. Neither bill contained any plans to raise revenue for the federal government.

The National Journal reports that House Republicans will incorporate these ideas into their version of the budget, taking military spending cuts off the table:

House Republicans are planning to pull the defense-spending cuts mandated by sequestration off the table in their version of the budget expected to be released next week, according to two Hill aides. [...]

Republican defense leaders have protested that the military was taking the brunt of spending cuts. But by firewalling defense from further cuts, House Republicans would need to pay for those expected cuts another way. At a House Budget Committee hearing, Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., told Panetta he felt entitlement spending should be on the table.

“With regards to the Budget Control Act, an across-the-board $97 billion discretionary spending cut will be imposed on January 2, 2013, including devastating cuts to our national security,” Ryan said in statement provided to National Journal. “House Republicans are continuing their efforts to reprioritize the savings called for under the Budget Control Act, because our troops and military families shouldn’t pay the price for Washington’s failure to take action.”

The National Journal said Republicans “declined to provide further details” of their budget, but it presumably won’t include raising taxes.

Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) earlier this month floated a decent idea for those wanting to preserve military spending: let the Bush tax cuts expire. “The vote to extend the Bush tax cuts in their entirety would, in essence, be the vote to lock in sequestration,” Smith said.

But even if lawmakers can’t find offsets for sequestration — and despite the hyperbolic warnings from Republicans, the defense industry and even the current Secretary of Defense — the Pentagon can, as CAP’s Lawrence Korb recently noted in the New York Times, “easily absorb” the sequestration’s security spending cuts.