New Details Released in House Check Scandal : Congress: Hunter had slightly fewer overdrafts than first reported; the amount of Lowery’s overdrafts exceeded his monthly salary five times in 39 months.

New details emerging in the House banking scandal reveal that Rep. Duncan Hunter had slightly fewer questionable checks than previously reported, and that Rep. Bill Lowery’s overdrafts exceeded his monthly salary five times in 39 months.

Hunter, whose 407 overdrafts were the most among the San Diego County delegation, has been told by the House Ethics Committee that eight of those overdrafts were attributable to slow posting of deposits by the now-closed bank. The Coronado Republican’s official totals in the scandal are now 399 checks with a total face value of $128,378.

A Hunter spokesman said the congressman “didn’t want to make a big deal” of the slight reduction, which he had held out as a possibility weeks ago after coming forward with details of his house banking practices.

Lowery’s 300 checks, totaling $103,968, remained the same, but new details show that the San Diego Republican’s account was in the red for nearly 300 days of the 1,200 days studied by the ethics committee, whose actual title is the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct. Most of Lowery’s overdrafts were for more than $1,000, and one was for $9,573.

Hunter’s account was short 318 days during the same period, and he overdrew his next month’s pay on one occasion.

The new information is contained in this weeks’s Congressional Quarterly and was confirmed by aides to the two congressmen.

Lowery and Hunter fall into the “second tier” of U.S. representatives who routinely ran up overdrafts at the loosely run bank but were not among the 19 current and five former members that the committee labeled as worst offenders.

In defining who was an “abuser,” the Ethics Committee decided to list only those members whose overdrafts exceeded their next months’s salary in eight or more of the 39 months studied.

But four Republicans on the committee unsuccessfully argued that the list should include at least 55 members who exceeded the monthly pay limit two or more times.

By that Republican-backed standard, Lowery would have been considered an “abuser.”

The list of all 355 members and former members who had at least one overdraft will be made public in about 10 days.