List disclosure raises concerns about future ethics investigations
Congressional leaders promise to examine leak
WASHINGTON - Congressional leaders yesterday expressed concern that the accidental disclosure of a list of more than two dozen members who had faced allegations of misconduct could compromise future ethics inquiries and unfairly taint some lawmakers who had been cleared of old complaints.
Calls started coming into ethics committee staff offices yesterday from House members and their staffs questioning why they were named in news articles as the targets of investigators. Representative Connie Mack, a Florida Republican, for example, was included on the ethics committee list, even though he was not a target himself, he said, but had just been questioned about the activities of another House member. “We’ve been told that we may be a witness to an investigation of others, but we are, of course, not the subject of any investigation,’’ Mack said in a statement.
House leaders promised to investigate the security breach behind the list’s release. “We are working diligently to provide the highest level of data security for the House in order to ensure that the operations of House offices are secure from unauthorized access,’’ said a joint statement by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House Republican leader, Representative John Boehner of Ohio.
The list was obtained by The
Perhaps the most serious case involves a defunct lobbying firm, PMA Group, and contributions it gave to House appropriators, who then pushed for earmarks in the defense budget that benefited the firm’s clients.
The list included seven members of the defense appropriations subcommittee. Spokesmen for those members said they had all been contacted by the ethics committee about their earmarks for PMA clients.
The seven members, including Representative John Murtha, Democrat of Pennsylvania, received a total of more than $6.2 million in contributions from PMA and its clients since 1998, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. And in the last two years they inserted more than $200 million in defense earmarks to PMA’s clients, according to a tally by Taxpayers for Common Sense, which tracks such items.
But so far, 10 months after investigators raided the offices of the PMA Group, the Justice Department appears to have focused mainly on Charles Brimmer, a former chief of staff and fund-raiser for Representative Peter Visclosky, Democrat of Indiana, two people familiar with the inquiry said yesterday.
Federal prosecutors appear to be examining the possibility that Brimmer demanded campaign contributions in exchange for earmarks that Visclosky inserted into spending bills, these people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.
One person involved in the investigation said the focus on Brimmer indicated that prosecutors had not turned up evidence of improprieties by Murtha, who, as chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee, has been the focus of much of the scrutiny in the case because of his ties to the PMA Group.
Inclusion on the ethics panel’s list already was turning into political fodder in some states, like Kansas, where Representative Todd Tiahrt, a Republican, is running for the Senate. His Republican primary opponent sent out an e-mail message yesterday across the state with the headline: “Tiahrt in trouble?’’
A spokesman for Tiahrt, Chuck Knapp, said ethics investigators had asked the representative how he handled earmark requests but said Tiahrt had no reason to believe he was a target.
