Ethics committee hires lawyer to review misconduct accusations in Maxine Waters case
Updated at 4:15 p.m. ET with a statement from Waters
The House ethics committee has hired outside counsel to review allegations that the committee and its staff engaged in partisan-driven, improper activity while handling the case against Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif.
The committee announced today it won't decide whether to drop the Waters case until attorney Billy Martin has reviewed the accusations and heard from Waters about her concerns.
On Tuesday, Waters' attorney, Stanley Brand, sent a letter to the leaders of the ethics committee threatening to sue the committee if the case wasn't dropped. "Any further action [in the investigation], save from formal acknowledgement of dismissal, is legally precluded and indefensible," said the letter, obtained by CBS News. Waters called for the case to be dropped on Monday after Politico first reported that staff attorneys for the committee accused each other of activities such as breaching confidentiality rules.
Brand on Tuesday wrote to Ethics Committee Chairman Jo Bonner, R-Ala., and Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the committee, that the evidence of inappropriate activity suggests the committee is guilty of "significant constitutional and rule-based violations."
Furthermore, Brand argued, the case should have already been considered dismissed, since the investigation was started in the last Congress and put on hold in November.
"Any further action by this Committee would be irremediably tainted and without legal foundation," the letter said.
Bonner and Sanchez said in their announcement today that "the committee has not taken these allegations lightly." Thus, Martin will conduct a "thorough review" of the allegations and report his findings and conclusions to the committee, which will then determine how to proceed.
Martin's outside counsel will "allow for an independent review and a faster resolution than if the committee staff were to handle it alone," Bonner and Sanchez said. It will also "help assure all respondents and the entire House community of the integrity of the committee's process for all matters."
In 2009, Waters was accused of improperly helping to arrange a September 2008 meeting between officials at the Treasury Department and representatives of a bank in which her husband had a financial interest. Three months later, the bank, OneUnited, received $12 million of the $700 billion bank bailout (as administrated by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson). Treasury officials have said the bailout funds were not given as a result of Waters's intervention.
The lawmaker, who has a high-ranking spot on the powerful House Financial Services Committee, has denied all wrongdoing and said she set up the meeting in order to help a minority-owned bank, not to help her husband.
Update: Waters released the following statement in response to the committee's announcement:
"For the first time in the history of the ethics committee, it has initiated an inquiry into its own misconduct and taken the extraordinary step of hiring an outside counsel to explore the depth and breadth of the committee's misconduct. Given what's already in the public domain, it's hard to imagine that a deeper review into the committee's conduct would do anything but reveal more troubling information. In the name of transparency, the Counsel's findings should be made public.
To be clear, today's action is a recognition by the committee, that its investigation of me was misguided, flawed and could go no further. I am confident that the counsel's review of the committee's misconduct will conclude that my rights were violated and further investigation of me is not warranted."
