I tried to interfere with a U.S. Attorney’s investigation, failed, got the Attorney fired, and all I got was this lousy letter of "qualified admonition."

The Senate Ethics Committee, yesterday, admonished Sen. Pete Domenici for creating an "appearance of impropriety" when he telephoned David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney for New Mexico, prior to the 2006 election to ask when he was going to bring indictments against Democrats for voter fraud. After not receiving the answer he wanted, Sen. Domenici pushed the White House to fire Iglesias, as they did along with other Attorneys.

This is said qualified letter of admonition. While an admonition seems like pretty weak tea for what Domenici did, it’s at least good to know that they actually do police themselves in the Senate, as opposed to the House. 

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The Hill reports on pressure directed at Speaker Nancy Pelosi to reconcile House ethics rules on lobbyist-sponsored convention parties with the more strict Senate rules, which the Senate reinforced on Monday. A grouping of six watchdogs (Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause, Democracy 21, League of Women Voters, Public Citizen, and U.S. PIRG) argue that the House rules punch huge holes in the ethics rules passed last fall that were meant to end the long-standing culture of corruption on Capitol Hill.

The new ethics law contains a convention party rule meant to prevent lobbyists from hosting parties to honor members in an effort to curry favor with them. The Senate Ethics Committee makes it clear that lobbyists or the organizations that they work for can’t sponsor events feting a group composed solely of members of Congress. In contrast, the House Ethics Committee’s guidelines said the new rules do allow lobbyists to sponsor parties honoring more than one member as long as those members are not mentioned by name.

Despite the fact that the Senate rules are stronger, The Hill questions whether "wiggle room" might yet exist. The Senate’s ethics panel outlawed parties thrown for a group of Members of Congress only, but says AOK to other parties aif the honorees lists include other pols or party functionaries such as delegates.

That’s some wiggle room. As The Hill’s headline said, "the party’s (not quite) over."

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I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog deriding the Senate Ethics Committee - and the frivolous complaints leveled by Sen. John Ensign against the current ethics process - for failing to investigate Senators who have allegedly violated the trust of their office (or the law, in the case of Sen. Ted Stevens). Thanks to the recently passed ethics bill, S.1, we finally get some transparency in the Ethics Committee and some statistical information about the committee’s activities. The Committee is now required to issue an annual report of activity. Here are some highlights:

Number of alleged violations received in 2007 (from any source): 95 (not including the 16 carried over from 2006)

Number of alleged violations dismissed in 2007 (including 7 cases carried over from 2006): 86 (71 for lack of jurisdiction; 15 for failure to provide sufficient facts)

Number of alleged violations which resulted in a preliminary hearing: 16 (includes 9 matters carried over from 2006 and 5 matters that have carried into 2008)

Number of alleged violations that resulted in adjudicatory review: 0

Number of alleged violations dismissed for lack of substantial merit: 11 (includes 7 matters carried over from 2006)

Number of matters resulting in disciplinary action: 0

Looking at those numbers I can reach a few conclusions. The first thing people will jump to is that the Ethics Committee is still conducting 5 investigations that have carried over from either 2006 or 2007. We know that retiring Sen. Pete Domenici is under investigation for his role in the Attorney purge scandal and that the committee may be investigating Sen. Larry Craig, also retiring, for his role in a Minneapolis airport bathroom (although I don’t understand what Senate Rule he violated). We can determine that 2 of these cases have carried over from 2006 by doing the math. We know that 16 cases were carried over from 2006 and that 14 of these were dismissed - 7 dismissed out of hand and 7 dismissed after a preliminary hearing - leaving us with 2 cases carried from 2006 that are still proceeding into 2008. (If you want to speculate as to who these Senators - or Senate aides - are please do so in the comments.)

The next thing to take from this report is that the Ethics Committee is very careful about which alleged violations it moves forward with. Despite the claims by Sen. Ensign that the Ethics Committee receives complaints on napkins and written in crayon and that this is damaging to Senators, we know now that of the 111 alleged violations received in 2007 and carried over from 2006, 86 were dismissed out of hand for lack of jurisdiction and for failure to provide sufficient facts. The Committee is only carrying over 5 cases from 2007, 2 of which we have determined are from 2006. Thus we can state that of the 111 alleged violations received or carried over, 5 have led to on-going investigations, a rate of 4.5%. It doesn’t sound like the Committee is having difficulty sifting through these complaints and it certainly doesn’t mean that every allegation submitted amounts to anything substantive.

I’ve included the most relevant information from the Committee’s first annual report on their activity in this post, but check the rest out for your self.

Despite the clear loopholes in the ethics bill’s lobbying and gift restrictions, the transparency provisions are beginning to funnel more information into the arms of the public. As more committees update their rules to comply with S.1, and we begin to receive the new reports and visit the Web site mandated under S.1, we will realize that the true legacy of the ethics bill will be the greater public access to information, allowing better citizen oversight and informed decision making, granted by the bill’s transparency provisions.

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Over the past week or two I’ve learned two things: do not tap your foot in the bathroom and that prudery is more prevalent on Capitol Hill than a true ethical fiber. Apparently it is more worrying that a Senator may be a deeply closeted gay man than it is that another Senator is deeply tied into a massive FBI-led corruption investigation or that a senior congressman is being investigated for perhaps the shadiest earmark ever. I read this article by Norm Ornstein today and couldn’t agree more with what he has to say. With so many corruption scandals, not just tawdry sex scandals, “Who believes that the ethics committee will act proactively to investigate allegedly scandalous behavior before stories garner headlines or result in announcements by prosecutors that Senators are targets or subjects of investigations?”

Washington is currently awash in cases of alleged ethical misconduct. From Rep. William Jefferson to Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young there are over a dozen members who could have their cases investigated by a congressional ethics committee. As you can see from this video compilation created by Josh Marshall there is more than the enough for the ethics committees to choose from.

Of course, neither ethics committee actually does any investigating of ethics unless pushed by other members and even then it is unclear what can push an investigation to become meaningful. The one case, of all the cases that actually involve impropriety in the official actions of a Member, immediately referred to the Senate Ethics Committee was the case of Sen. Larry Craig. Personally, I can’t think of a single thing that Craig has done in violation of Senate Rules and therefore I don’t know why this case, as opposed to bribery investigations, is being referred to the Ethics Committee; although I can guess.

Sexual prudery rules on Capitol Hill, while true ethical misconduct goes unnoticed. Craig had his committee seats stripped within days after he was caught tapping his foot in a men’s bathroom. Sen. Stevens, under investigation for accepting bribes from Alaska oil execs, is still the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, the most powerful committee in the Senate. Rep. Young, under investigation for trading earmarks for campaign contributions among other things, is still the ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee and the second-ranking member on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, the very committee from which he inserted various earmarks that have caught the attention of the FBI.

From Fanne Fox to Larry Craig, Capitol Hill has been equally appalled and enthralled by political sex scandals. Maybe it’s time they get their priorities straight and focus on the real unethical muck going on behind doors in Congress and not bathroom doors in Minneapolis. It’s time for congressmen to stop pointing their noses up and instead point them down into some papers and get to investigating the actual problems in their own house.

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The Washington Post reports that the Senate ethics committee is investigating Sen. Pete Domenici's (R-NM) role in the alleged pressuring and subsequent firing of Attorney David Iglesias. Domenici announced that he has hired K. Lee Blalack, the former defense attorney for Randy "Duke" Cunningham, to represent him. The revelations in the committee hearings on Tuesday clearly have pushed this story further as it appears that, despite constantly changing excuses, two Members of Congress put unprecedented pressure on a U.S. Attorney to bring down indictments to help the re-election campaign of Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM).

U.S. News & World Report stated yesterday that Domenici "probably doesn't need to worry about disciplinary action." Their chief opinion columnist Michael Barone has quite a different take:

When a U.S. senator (to wit, Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican) feels free to call a prosecutor at home and hang up on him for resisting political pressure in the course of executing his prosecutorial duties, the line between politics and law enforcement has been so thoroughly violated that it no longer exists.

…

Domenici would not have made that call had either a Democrat or a law-abiding Republican been in the White House. He would not have had the temerity to throw his weight around to such an outrageous extent.

What's going on in Washington is not sufficiently removed from the routine doings of a tawdry Third World dictatorship to give any American comfort.

The Senate ethics committee will likely explore the timing of the calls placed by Sen. Domenici and whether he contacted the Justice Department and what he said to them about Iglesias' performance. The real question is whether the House ethics committee will step up to the plate and investigate Rep. Wilson, who has already stated that she has essentially done exactly what Mr. Iglesias has alleged. (She just believes that her call was not intended to put pressure on Iglesias.) Right now it looks like the House will continue to be an embarrassment of ethics as it is unable and unwilling to police its own. From the DeLay inspired purge of the ethics committee in 2005 all the way through the incomprehensible Mark Foley report from late last year (everyone screwed up but they shouldn't be punished) the ethics committee in the House has been a joke. Some congressman or woman needs to step up and refer this issue to the ethics committee before this becomes a serious problem.

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