Ethics Trial Expected for California Congresswoman

WASHINGTON — Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, will face charges of misusing her office and is expected to contest the claims in a House trial, the second powerful House Democrat to opt for such a public airing in recent days, Congressional officials said Friday.

A House ethics subcommittee has charged Ms. Waters, 71, a 10-term congresswoman, in a case involving communications that she had with the top executive of a bank that her husband owned stock in while it was applying for a federal bailout in 2008, two House officials said.

Charges are expected to be announced next week, several Congressional officials said, speaking only on the condition of anonymity because the proceedings remained confidential. Details of the specific accusations of wrongdoing were not available Friday evening.

The expected trial, coming just after the start of a similar proceeding on Thursday for Representative Charles B. Rangel of New York, would be a modern-day precedent for the House, Congressional officials said. At no time in at least the last two decades have two sitting House members faced a public hearing detailing allegations against them.

It would also be an embarrassment for the Congressional Black Caucus. Ms. Waters and Mr. Rangel are two of its most revered and long-standing members, and both have spent decades as key leaders in banking and financial services issues in the House.

Mikael Moore, Ms. Waters’s chief of staff, declined to comment on the case on Friday, saying that the congresswoman had not been formally notified of any action by the ethics committee.

Ms. Waters, at the time the investigation by the House ethics panel began last fall, was accused of intervening on behalf of OneUnited, a Boston-based bank. The Times reported last year that Ms. Waters called Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. in 2008, as the economy was in a free fall, to ask him to host a special meeting with executives from black-owned banks.

As a key House player on the Financial Services Committee, Ms. Waters often called Mr. Paulson. He agreed to arrange the requested meeting, The New York Times reported last year.

What Mr. Paulson did not know at the time was that Ms. Waters’s husband, Sidney Williams, owned stock in and had served on the board of OneUnited, whose chief executive turned the Treasury headquarters meeting into a special appeal for bailout assistance. The executive of the institution, one of the nation’s largest black-owned banks, asked for $50 million in federal aid, The Times reported.

After articles on the case by The Times and The Wall Street Journal, the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent watchdog agency, began an inquiry. The office referred the matter to the ethics committee, which charged the subcommittee with opening an examination of Ms. Waters’s activities. The four-member subcommittee, which included two Democrats and two Republicans, was led by Representative Kathy Castor, Democrat of Florida.

Because Ms. Waters — like Mr. Rangel — has refused to agree to a proposed settlement, the case is headed toward a House ethics trial, officials said. “She is fighting it,” one House official said Friday.

Ms. Waters made the call to Mr. Paulson on behalf of the National Bankers Association, a Washington-based organization of minority-owned banks. Its incoming chairman, Robert Cooper, was an executive at OneUnited, which had branches in Miami and Los Angeles, part of which Ms. Waters represents.

Mr. Cooper and his boss, Kevin Cohee, the chief executive at OneUnited, ended up dominating the meeting, participants said, and made an unusual request for a special federal bailout.

The Treasury Department officials, in interviews with The Times, said they were taken aback when they later learned about Ms. Waters’s ties to the bank. She had once owned stock in the bank, and her husband still did. He had stepped down from the board earlier that year.

Mr. Rangel separately is facing charges that he inappropriately used his office staff to try to line up donations for a New York City educational center being built in his honor, and also that he failed to report income from a beachfront property he had rented out in the Caribbean.

The prospect of two trials playing out as the November election approaches will almost certainly be seized upon by Republicans, who already had been attacking Democrats’ moral leadership and questioning whether Speaker Nancy Pelosi had lived up to her promise to “drain the swamp” of ethics violations in Washington.

The case could still be concluded without trial, if Ms. Waters decided to settle. But if a trial were to take place, it is highly unlikely that it would start before September, as the House began its summer recess on Friday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/31/us/politics/31waters.html?_r=1&hp

This is becoming an epidemic amongst Democrats lately. Anyone willing to take odds on who's gonna be caught with their hand in the till next? I think this is a good argument for term limits in all levels of government. This woman served 10 terms in congress. In my opinion, it seems as though once a politician is re-elected a certain number of times s/he gets the feeling that s/he can do whatever they want and their job is secure as long as they have a pulse. They seem to act as though they're above the law and nothing they do is wrong, or they will not be punished for it. They forget that they're put there by voters and can be cast out as easily as they were put there. IMO, they don't just bring shame upon their party, but the democratic process.

alland wrote:This is becoming an epidemic amongst Democrats lately. Anyone willing to take odds on who's gonna be caught with their hand in the till next? I think this is a good argument for term limits in all levels of government. This woman served 10 terms in congress. In my opinion, it seems as though once a politician is re-elected a certain number of times s/he gets the feeling that s/he can do whatever they want and their job is secure as long as they have a pulse. They seem to act as though they're above the law and nothing they do is wrong, or they will not be punished for it. They forget that they're put there by voters and can be cast out as easily as they were put there. IMO, they don't just bring shame upon their party, but the democratic process.

I think it's a good thing in only one regard and that's to show Democrat voters here in the US that corruption knows no party or ideology. The Dems railed on about all the corruption with the GOP during the Bush years as if their party was crystal clean. Now we see different. My uncle (again) has a phrase and it applies with congress directly. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It's true to the point.

Term limits? Yessiree! We need them here. Senators serve 6 yr terms. Representatives (like Rangel and Waters) serve 2 yr terms. I say on 6 yr term for a senator and three 2 yr terms for Reps. All this shit would quit happening.

TexasBlue wrote:I think it's a good thing in only one regard and that's to show Democrat voters here in the US that corruption knows no party or ideology. The Dems railed on about all the corruption with the GOP during the Bush years as if their party was crystal clean. Now we see different. My uncle (again) has a phrase and it applies with congress directly. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It's true to the point.

Yeah, I think you're right. Liberals (in The US and Canada) have been pretty smug, IMO, thinking that only conservative politicians are corrupt. It's time they found out the truth. It will be good for the country, I think.

It is good but sad at the same time. But what really gets on my nerves is how this one congressman got nailed for bribery by the FBI and during his wait for trial, he got reelected by his constituents. Then he got sentenced to 13 yrs in the federal pen. Shows ya how stupid some people are for even voting for the guy.

TexasBlue wrote:It is good but sad at the same time. But what really gets on my nerves is how this one congressman got nailed for bribery by the FBI and during his wait for trial, he got reelected by his constituents. Then he got sentenced to 13 yrs in the federal pen. Shows ya how stupid some people are for even voting for the guy.

Similar things have happened here. I don't quite understand it, but it seems like some people like politicians they consider mavericks (and I don't mean McCain), or even bandits. Sometimes folks cheer for the guy wearing black or the underdog, even when he's screwing them.

That shit makes no sense at all. I moonwalk away from politicians i like that fuck up.

TexasBlue wrote:That shit makes no sense at all. I moonwalk away from politicians i like that fuck up.

I know, but some voters love guys like that. We had a provincial politician here who skimmed/stole a bunch of money from gov't programs for his constituants and was found guilty, but still re-elected as an independant after his party kicked him out. It's like the voters saw him as the Billy the Kid of politics and admired him for it because deep-down they wanted to do the same. Yeah... it's effed-up.