Rangel Lawsuit Against Ethic Committee Hinges on Secret Memo

[DonViejo]

by Eleanor Clift Apr 24, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

The New York congressman is fighting back against a 2010 House censure with a lawsuit alleging the Ethics Committee withheld vital information. Eleanor Clift on the politically charged memo behind it.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) handily won reelection in November, even though his House colleagues had voted to censure him for ethics violations in 2010 by an overwhelming margin, 333 to 79. He could have left those charges alone, knowing they had not dissuaded his constituents from supporting him, but that wouldn’t be the Rangel way. So he is back fighting with a lawsuit filed against House Speaker John Boehner and the six lawmakers who sat on the ethics panel that brought the charges against him.

The substance of the charges against him are almost a sideshow: failing to pay taxes on the rental income he received from a vacation home in the Dominican Republic and using his position as a powerful committee chairman to solicit donations from companies wanting to court him top the list. Rangel has taken issue with how the six-member Ethics Committee arrived at their decision and whether relevant information was withheld.

That’s where it gets interesting. Jay Goldberg, Rangel’s attorney, uncovered a secret July 2011 memo from Democratic staff director Blake Chisam outlining at length his concerns about the performance of two committee attorneys, Stacy Sovereign and Cindy Morgan Kim. The most stinging of the complaints are politically charged, accusing the attorneys of essentially being in cahoots with the Republican members, constructing scenarios that went beyond the facts to charge Rangel, and alleging that Sovereign in particular made racially prejudicial remarks suggesting a bias that made coworkers uncomfortable.

The staff director’s memo quotes Sovereign talking about her previous job as a prosecutor in the Washington, D.C., U.S. attorney’s office and wondering how she, as a “blond-haired, blue-eyed prosecutor,” could ever get a D.C. jury to convict a defendant.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/24/rangel-lawsuit-against-ethic-committee-hinges-on-secret-memo.html