Rangel ethics case in hands of jury panel

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Once one of the most powerful members of Congress, veteran Rep. Charles Rangel of New York was reduced Monday to pleading with colleagues for more time to raise money for a lawyer before they took up misconduct charges against him. No, they said, and quickly began deliberations, saying the facts were so clear they didn’t need to call witnesses.

The panel met for several hours before quitting for the day. Deliberations were to resume today.

Rangel, 80, a 20-term Democrat representing New York’s famed Harlem neighborhood, implored a House ethics-committee panel to delay, declaring in an emotional address that “50 years of public service is on the line.” But the panel basically decided that the 21/2-year-old case had gone on long enough — and Congress had little time left to deal with it in the lame-duck session that commenced Monday.

He faces 13 counts of alleged financial and fundraising misconduct that could bring formal condemnation. He left the hearing before his request was formally rejected, and the rare proceeding — only the second for this type of hearing in two decades — went on without him.

The panel of four Democrats and four Republicans is sitting as a jury in the case. If they decide Rangel violated any House rules, the full committee will conduct a hearing on how he should be punished. The most likely sanction would be a House vote deploring his conduct.

Rangel told them he had run out of money after paying his previous attorneys some $2 million and needed time to set up a legal- defense fund to raise an additional $1 million.

Until last spring, Rangel had wielded great influence as chairman of the tax- writing Ways and Means Committee, a gravelly voiced, outgoing figure who raised millions for fellow lawmakers’ campaigns. He relinquished that chairmanship in March after being admonished by the ethics committee for taking two corporate-paid trips to the Caribbean in violation of House rules. There was no further punishment for that, but the current charges are another matter.

After Rangel left Monday’s hearing, House ethics- committee chief counsel Blake Chisam pushed for a decision on the allegations that he had violated House rules. Chisam played a video of Rangel’s speech on the House floor in August in which the congressman acknowledged that he’d used House stationery to raise money for a college center named after him and that he’d been tardy in filing taxes and financial disclosure statements.

He said then that he never intended to break any rules.