House ethics punts Waters’s ethics case to outside counsel

[alp227]

Source: The Washington Post

The House ethics committee is poised to pay a half-million dollars by year’s end to resolve the mess that remains of its three-year probe of Rep. Maxine Waters.

An outside counsel and his private law firm will sort out how to handle the most substantive case on the committee’s plate this session, as the committee tackles more modest matters. Waters, a powerful California Democrat, and a former committee senior staffer have separately questioned the integrity of the committee’s investigation.

Since last fall, stories in The Post and other news media have revealed that partisan squabbling between both staff and committee members derailed the Waters probe by the end of 2010, and threatened other ethics cases. The allegations, first made against her in early 2009, center on whether Waters used her public office to help bail out OneUnited, a bank in which her husband had a significant investment.

A recent Politico story revealed many more details in an internal 2010 memo from the former committee staff director. In it, he accused the two investigators under his supervision of secretly sharing information about the case with only Republican members, including Rep. Jo Bonner (R-Ala.) the then-ranking member who has since become ethics committee chairman in the Republican House.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/house-ethics-punts-waterss-ethics-case-to-outside-counsel/2011/07/29/gIQA7rbg4I_story.html

[Angry Dragon]

1. I see they have no trouble spending money the American people do not have