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11-17-2010, 12:23 PM
House Panel Finds Rangel Guilty
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
Published: November 16, 2010
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A House panel on Tuesday found Representative Charles B. Rangel guilty of 11 counts of ethical violations, ruling that his failure to pay some taxes, improper solicitation of charitable donations and failure to accurately report his personal income had brought dishonor on the House.
Enlarge This Image
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Representative Charles B. Rangel in the Capitol on Tuesday. Below, the chairwoman of the ethics panel, Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California.
City Room: Details on the Charges
Enlarge This Image
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Representative Charles B. Rangel in the Capitol on Tuesday. Below, the chairwoman of the ethics panel, Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California.
After a public hearing on Monday that was truncated when Mr. Rangel walked out in protest, an adjudicatory subcommittee of the House ethics committee deliberated for four hours before finding him guilty of all but one of the 13 counts against him. (Two counts, involving Mr. Rangel’s misuse of House mailing privileges, were merged into one.)
In a somber tone, Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the panel, announced the findings just before noon. Ms. Lofgren described the contentious process as “difficult and time-consuming.” The entire committee is to decide on Thursday what punishment to recommend for Mr. Rangel. The full House must vote on the recommendation.
While the rules permit a range of penalties, up to expulsion, ethics experts and panel members have said that Mr. Rangel, 80, is more likely to face a reprimand or a formal censure. Mr. Rangel, a Harlem Democrat, did not appear before the panel as it announced its verdict, but he released a statement shortly afterward calling it unfair because he could no longer afford a lawyer to mount a defense. And, even though he was the one who stormed out of the proceedings on Monday, he complained that the panel had taken action when he was not present.
“How can anyone have confidence in the decision of the ethics subcommittee when I was deprived of due process rights, right to counsel and was not even in the room?” the statement read. “I can only hope that the full committee will treat me more fairly, and take into account my entire 40 years of service to the Congress before making any decisions on sanctions.”
Because Mr. Rangel did not mount a defense, the panel is moving quickly through its three-phase proceeding: On Monday, it accepted as “uncontested” the facts underlying the prosecution’s case against him. On Tuesday, it determined that his behavior constituted violations of House ethics rules. The last phase deals with the penalty.
The panel’s verdict was a humbling rebuke for Mr. Rangel, who has represented Harlem for 40 years and who was once one of the most imposing Democrats in Washington.
Since the accusations were first raised two years ago, Mr. Rangel has acknowledged bookkeeping errors in his financial disclosure forms and has said that his failure to pay more than $60,000 in taxes on rental income from a Dominican beach house was an oversight, caused, in part, by his inability to speak Spanish.
But he angrily denied accusations that he used his position to receive special treatment or misused his office as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee to raise money for a City College school of public service being built in his honor.
The only charge the committee cleared him of was an accusation that his involvement with the effort to build the school, the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service, constituted an improper gift because it would provide him with an office and an archivist to oversee his papers after he retires.
The investigation of Mr. Rangel began after news reports that he had accepted four rent-stabilized apartments at prices hundreds of dollars per month below market value.
In the months that followed, Mr. Rangel confronted more ethics accusations. He was accused of failing to declare hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal assets on his financial disclosure forms, failing to pay state and federal taxes on rental income on his villa in the Dominican Republic and helping to preserve a tax loophole worth hundreds of millions of dollars for an oil company at the same time that he was seeking a $1 million contribution to the Rangel Center from a company executive.
Because of Mr. Rangel’s high profile on the political stage and sway within the Democratic caucus, the case became viewed as a major test of the newly revamped Congressional ethics process. In the Republicans’ effort to recapture the House, they used Mr. Rangel to symbolize Democratic wavering on a promise to “drain the swamp.” Democrats countered by pledging that their determination to handle the matter fairly would prove their commitment to raising the bar on ethics in Washington.
While Democrats have been reluctant to criticize Mr. Rangel publicly, he was pressured into relinquishing his coveted position as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in March.
The ranking Republican member of the ethics committee, Representative Michael T. McCaul of Texas, said Tuesday that the investigation and verdict should allay concerns about the House’s ability to enforce its rules.
“I’m hopeful as we move forward with this matter into the next phase,” Mr. McCaul said, “that at the end of the day we will be able to begin an era of transparency and accountability, a new era of ethics that will restore the credibility of this house.”
But government accountability groups were critical of the secrecy and delays that surrounded the process. “There’s no good reason why it should have taken so long to bring a relatively simple case to a head,” said Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause.
While Mr. Rangel has been weakened by the long-running scandal, he will nonetheless retain the power to determine his own political fate.
He has remained defiant throughout the process — at one point making a rambling defense of his actions on the floor of the House — and is all but certain to brush aside any calls for his resignation from Republicans or government ethics advocates. Just this month he won re-election to a 21st term.
One unanswered question about the investigation is the committee’s decision to charge Mr. Rangel with ethics violations for only one of the four rent-stabilized apartments he accepted from a Manhattan developer. In addition to the apartment he used as a campaign office, Mr. Rangel and his wife used three discounted apartments as their residence for years.
In his statement, Mr. Rangel sought again to stress that he was not acting to reap personal financial gain. “The committee’s findings,” he wrote, “are even more difficult to understand in view of yesterday’s declaration by the committee’s chief counsel, Blake Chisam, that there was no evidence of corruption or personal gain in his findings.”
A version of this article appeared in print on November 17, 2010, on page A24 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/nyregion/17rangel.html?bl
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI
Published: November 16, 2010
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A House panel on Tuesday found Representative Charles B. Rangel guilty of 11 counts of ethical violations, ruling that his failure to pay some taxes, improper solicitation of charitable donations and failure to accurately report his personal income had brought dishonor on the House.
Enlarge This Image
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Representative Charles B. Rangel in the Capitol on Tuesday. Below, the chairwoman of the ethics panel, Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California.
City Room: Details on the Charges
Enlarge This Image
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Representative Charles B. Rangel in the Capitol on Tuesday. Below, the chairwoman of the ethics panel, Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California.
After a public hearing on Monday that was truncated when Mr. Rangel walked out in protest, an adjudicatory subcommittee of the House ethics committee deliberated for four hours before finding him guilty of all but one of the 13 counts against him. (Two counts, involving Mr. Rangel’s misuse of House mailing privileges, were merged into one.)
In a somber tone, Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the panel, announced the findings just before noon. Ms. Lofgren described the contentious process as “difficult and time-consuming.” The entire committee is to decide on Thursday what punishment to recommend for Mr. Rangel. The full House must vote on the recommendation.
While the rules permit a range of penalties, up to expulsion, ethics experts and panel members have said that Mr. Rangel, 80, is more likely to face a reprimand or a formal censure. Mr. Rangel, a Harlem Democrat, did not appear before the panel as it announced its verdict, but he released a statement shortly afterward calling it unfair because he could no longer afford a lawyer to mount a defense. And, even though he was the one who stormed out of the proceedings on Monday, he complained that the panel had taken action when he was not present.
“How can anyone have confidence in the decision of the ethics subcommittee when I was deprived of due process rights, right to counsel and was not even in the room?” the statement read. “I can only hope that the full committee will treat me more fairly, and take into account my entire 40 years of service to the Congress before making any decisions on sanctions.”
Because Mr. Rangel did not mount a defense, the panel is moving quickly through its three-phase proceeding: On Monday, it accepted as “uncontested” the facts underlying the prosecution’s case against him. On Tuesday, it determined that his behavior constituted violations of House ethics rules. The last phase deals with the penalty.
The panel’s verdict was a humbling rebuke for Mr. Rangel, who has represented Harlem for 40 years and who was once one of the most imposing Democrats in Washington.
Since the accusations were first raised two years ago, Mr. Rangel has acknowledged bookkeeping errors in his financial disclosure forms and has said that his failure to pay more than $60,000 in taxes on rental income from a Dominican beach house was an oversight, caused, in part, by his inability to speak Spanish.
But he angrily denied accusations that he used his position to receive special treatment or misused his office as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee to raise money for a City College school of public service being built in his honor.
The only charge the committee cleared him of was an accusation that his involvement with the effort to build the school, the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service, constituted an improper gift because it would provide him with an office and an archivist to oversee his papers after he retires.
The investigation of Mr. Rangel began after news reports that he had accepted four rent-stabilized apartments at prices hundreds of dollars per month below market value.
In the months that followed, Mr. Rangel confronted more ethics accusations. He was accused of failing to declare hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal assets on his financial disclosure forms, failing to pay state and federal taxes on rental income on his villa in the Dominican Republic and helping to preserve a tax loophole worth hundreds of millions of dollars for an oil company at the same time that he was seeking a $1 million contribution to the Rangel Center from a company executive.
Because of Mr. Rangel’s high profile on the political stage and sway within the Democratic caucus, the case became viewed as a major test of the newly revamped Congressional ethics process. In the Republicans’ effort to recapture the House, they used Mr. Rangel to symbolize Democratic wavering on a promise to “drain the swamp.” Democrats countered by pledging that their determination to handle the matter fairly would prove their commitment to raising the bar on ethics in Washington.
While Democrats have been reluctant to criticize Mr. Rangel publicly, he was pressured into relinquishing his coveted position as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in March.
The ranking Republican member of the ethics committee, Representative Michael T. McCaul of Texas, said Tuesday that the investigation and verdict should allay concerns about the House’s ability to enforce its rules.
“I’m hopeful as we move forward with this matter into the next phase,” Mr. McCaul said, “that at the end of the day we will be able to begin an era of transparency and accountability, a new era of ethics that will restore the credibility of this house.”
But government accountability groups were critical of the secrecy and delays that surrounded the process. “There’s no good reason why it should have taken so long to bring a relatively simple case to a head,” said Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause.
While Mr. Rangel has been weakened by the long-running scandal, he will nonetheless retain the power to determine his own political fate.
He has remained defiant throughout the process — at one point making a rambling defense of his actions on the floor of the House — and is all but certain to brush aside any calls for his resignation from Republicans or government ethics advocates. Just this month he won re-election to a 21st term.
One unanswered question about the investigation is the committee’s decision to charge Mr. Rangel with ethics violations for only one of the four rent-stabilized apartments he accepted from a Manhattan developer. In addition to the apartment he used as a campaign office, Mr. Rangel and his wife used three discounted apartments as their residence for years.
In his statement, Mr. Rangel sought again to stress that he was not acting to reap personal financial gain. “The committee’s findings,” he wrote, “are even more difficult to understand in view of yesterday’s declaration by the committee’s chief counsel, Blake Chisam, that there was no evidence of corruption or personal gain in his findings.”
A version of this article appeared in print on November 17, 2010, on page A24 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/nyregion/17rangel.html?bl