Lawmaker's lawyer: Bribe charge bogus

ALEXANDRIA, Va. --A Louisiana congressman caught on tape accepting a $100,000 cash payment should not have been charged with bribery because technically, such an act is closer to influence peddling than bribery, defense lawyers argued Friday.

Lawyers for Democratic Rep. William Jefferson made no admission that Jefferson engaged in improper conduct. But defense attorney Amy Jackson argued that even if the government's allegations are true, they do not constitute bribery under federal law.

"We think using influence is not a bribe," Jackson told U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in seeking to have some of the charges dismissed.

Prosecutors scoffed at the argument, and Ellis seemed skeptical. He offered several hypothetical situations that he likened to the conduct alleged in Jefferson's case and questioned whether such situations did not amount to bribery.

Jackson maintained that federal law defines bribery as receiving payment for an official act. Congress spells out influence peddling as improper in its ethics rules but specifically neglects to do so under the bribery statute, she said.

If Jefferson had taken money in exchange for sponsoring legislation or voting a particular way on a specific bill, it would be a bribe, Jackson said. But she contended that the misdeeds prosecutors allege -- helping to broker business deals in Africa in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments -- fall outside that definition.

"We must apply the law as it is written, not as the Department of Justice wants it to be read or ... not even as a commonsense interpretation of right or wrong might think it should be read," she said.

Prosecutor Mark Lytle cited several legal precedents that he said differ with the defense interpretation, and said Jefferson's efforts to secure business deals qualify as abuse of his official duties by helping only those constituents who paid him money.

The 16-count indictment alleges 11 separate schemes in which Jefferson is to have used his influence as co-chairman of the congressional Africa Investment and Trade Caucus to broker deals in Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon and other African nations.

Ellis did not rule on the defense motion to dismiss some of the counts in the indictment, which alleges Jefferson received more than $500,000 in bribes and demanded millions more between 2000 and 2005.

While defense lawyers are challenging large swaths of evidence, they have not sought to suppress the most notorious piece -- the videotape of Jefferson taking a $100,000 cash payment from a cooperating witness, followed by a raid on the congressman's Washington home in which $90,000 of the money was recovered from his freezer.

Jefferson, a nine-term congressman, attended Friday's hearing but did not speak during it and did not comment afterward.